Poetry collections reward different engagement strategies than prose. You can read a collection straight through on first encounter, and this is sometimes the right choice for collections that are organized as a single long argument. But for most collections, I find a different approach works better: read two or three poems, then stop. Live with them for a day or two. Return to the collection.

This approach acknowledges that poems work over time. A poem that seems simple on first reading accumulates meaning through memory and association. When you return to the collection a week later, the early poems look different because you've been living with them.

The collection I've been reading this way recently is Louise Glück's Averno, which takes the myth of Persephone as a structure for poems about grief, desire, and the relationship between the living and the dead. It rewards slow reading almost as a condition of comprehension.