Originally published in 1978, the late Bernadette Mayer’s poetry collection The Golden Book of Words is available again from New Directions, reissued with the gorgeous original cover design by Joe Brainard. The collection includes both better-known early poems like “Essay” (“I guess it’s too late to live on the farm / I guess it’s too late to move to a farm / I guess it’s too late to begin farming”) and a variety of other, equally vibrant and formally inventive poems such as “Simplicities are Glittering” and “What Babies Really Do.”

Mayer, associated with the Language Poets and the New York School, is known for her experimentation with stream-of-consciousness narration in her poetry and for her frank portrayal of motherhood. Widely admired for its rejection of the poetic establishment and what critic Stephanie Burt in 2018 called “any model of poetry that requires perfection,” Mayer’s radically messy poetic vision continues to exert remarkable force on contemporary poetic practice.

In this early collection, Mayer centers the changing New England seasons and the progression of her own life. With unselfconscious frankness, Mayer documents the quotidian details of daily existence: autumn leaves and spring blossoms, the birth of her daughter, her wedding anniversary, Irish soda bread and canned beans and frozen pipes.

The book opens with its title poem, “The Golden Book of Words,” a reimagining of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 76. The poem sets the tone for the rest of the collection: Mayer feels no obligation to perform cleverness. Shakespeare’s sonnet is preserved almost entirely in full—she simply adds a few lines of her own, retaining much of the original’s iambic pentameter but not the sonnet form. Mayer seems to delight in the contrast between Shakespeare’s voice and her own, which remains decidedly modern and matter-of-fact. “Why write I still all one, ever the same, / Now past the hunger of studying psychology?” she asks. She appears to have no interest in showing off, shirking Shakespearean diction and grandiosity for an angular plainness; in lines like this, she laughs alongside her readers at the absurdity of her task.

The rest of the collection, though formally diverse, is written in a similar spirit: Mayer takes what she likes from the poetic canon and cheerfully turns it upside down. She treats Shakespeare— and Pound and Williams and Ginsberg—with an affectionate lack of reverence; in “Eve of Easter,” she imagines her sleeping infant children as descendants of “Milton and Melville and Hawthorne,” and refers to them each in kind. “I think I’ll go get Hawthorne,” she says, “and nurse her for the pleasure / Of cutting through darkness before her measured noise / Stimulates the boys.” The august forefathers of Mayer’s craft become the namesakes of her sleeping children; by inviting the literary canon so easily into her nursery, she blurs the lines between her art and her home. The easy flow of her poetry’s natural rhythm and internal rhymes takes the place of any formal meter or high poetic diction. Literature, for Mayer, is an embodied and living thing, to be treated with as much love and familiarity—and as little veneration—as her own infant daughters.

It’s this fusion of the literary and the so-called “domestic” that marks Mayer’s foremost achievement in The Golden Book of Words: She continually breaks down distinctions between art and life, revealing beauty in the mundane, inviting us to appreciate and even revere the minutiae of our own lives. In “Leaves Fall Down,” for example, Mayer gestures to the conventions of the genre of nature poetry, describing the burst of thunder and the yellow light on the willow tree, the “ideal light of snow.” But she refuses to remain too long in this world of the “ideal,” the poetic sublime, turning instead, in the very same stanza, to banal thoughts of a family friend traveling through a storm to pay a visit. In “What Babies Really Do,” she eschews elevated diction for ungrammatical and largely monosyllabic language to describe with beautiful simplicity the experience of standing outside on a windy day with her infant daughter:

Listen, gaggle gaggle

broo ah ha ha

thoughts unravel

run after her

 

The sun won the edge of the wind is cold two three

Nothing much but poetry

Ah ha I hear

Her daughter’s babbled articulation of the experience is, for Mayer, as much “poetry” as any more eloquent description could be.

Maisie Bilston is a Senior at Yale University, where she studies English with a Creative Writing concentration. She is founding editor at Cherry Road Review and has interned at American Short Fiction and Curtis Brown Ltd,; she is also the Managing Literary Editor at the Yale Literary Magazine. Her poetry has won several prizes, most recently the Yale University Academy of American Poets prize and the Albert Stanburrough Cook Prize for undergraduate poetry, and she was the university representative on the 2025 Connecticut Poetry Circuit. When not writing, she enjoys reading Agatha Christie novels in the bath, taking long walks, and spending time with her dog, a black Labrador called Mephistopheles who has yet to live up to his name.