There are so many contemporary poets out there, how does a reader come to pay special attention to the work of one? In my case, it was because my wife very much liked a sonnet she found on Verse Daily, then emailed to me. The poem was Marilyn L. Taylor's "The Geniuses Among Us." Here it is:

They take us by surprise, these tall perennials
that jut like hollyhocks above the canopy
of all the rest of us—bright testimonials
to the scale of human possibility.
They come to bloom for every generation,
blazing with extraordinary notions
from the taproots of imagination—
dazzling us with incandescent visions.
And soon, the things we never thought would happen
start to happen: the solid fences
of reality begin to soften,
crumbling into fables and romances—
and we turn away from where we've been
to a new place, where light is pouring in.

I read the poem, was taken enough by it to print it out, reread it slowly, liked it even more, and finally wrote a note of admiration to its author—whom I've never met personally. I told her of my intent to buy the book from which the poem came, hoping to find other of her poems that would equally move me.

Too often when I do this, it turns out that the book of poems doesn't live up to the single poem that caught my attention. Or perhaps I've found three or four other poems by the poet on the Internet. In either case, when I read an entire book by their author, a preponderance of weaker or weak poems disappoints. Over the years, I've come to believe that many poets of our times have written one or two exceptional poems, but very few have created bodies of work which include a high number of other works nearly equal in quality.