This mixed bouquet of ten poets, courtesy of Kansas City, comes in time for National Poetry Month. If everyone loves a lover, you’ll enjoy listening to various poets’ takes on matters of the heart. Angela Elam hosts another half-hour “New Letters on the Air” piece with musical interludes mainly by Kevin MacLeod, featuring her own signature TLC.

Naturally, I have certain faves among the ten love poems. I particularly like Charles Simic’s “The Beloved,” which begins with sass:

In the fine print of her face
Her eyes are two loopholes.
No, let me start again.
Her eyes are flies in milk.
Her eyes are baby Draculas.

And then there’s Billy Collins’s outrageous takeoff of Jacques Crickillon, “Litany,” which starts:

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.

Love poems by two other Poets Laureate, Rita Dove and Kay Ryan, are also terrific.

Elsewhere, the intensity ebbs a bit, for me at least. Unfortunately, Elam refers to The Academy of American Poets with a slightly botched phrase. Plus, she mistakes the phrasing of the original title that preceded the current term for the United States Poet Laureate.

Hey, no big deal! Ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths of one percent of Americans couldn’t care a figleaf about such nitpicky issues.

Overall, this bouquet of poets will have plenty of flower power on public radio now that spring has sprung, tra-la.