April is National Poetry Month. Sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, the monthlong series of events is intended to spur schools, libraries, publishers, booksellers and literary organizations around the country to celebrate poetry and its vital place in American culture. In keeping with that tradition, Somesville poet Carl Little, Stockton Springs writer Donna Gold and University of Maine English instructor Dana Wilde offer their takes on just a few of the new offerings from Maine’s community of poets and illustrators of poetry.

Praia de Batata

is a postcard beach

with cliff like husks

of burnt sienna, ochre

archways

(sea-chiselled, vaulted, salt-licked) ? each one framing

what passes, remains sky

? Candice Stover

WALKING TO WINDWARD: 21 New England Poets, Oyster River Press, Durham, N.H., $135 ($125 during April) for four boxed sets or $8 for individual chapbooks, paperbound.

Poetry comes in a lot of different shapes and sizes, from the handsome “Backwoods Broadsides” published by Sylvester Pollet in Ellsworth to massive anthologies requiring a forklift. In between, one finds the venerable chapbook, traditionally somewhere around 24-30 pages long – just enough for the poet to present himself or herself, and for us to get to know a voice.

In this 21-chapbook salute to New England poets, five of the featured authors are Maine-based: Kate Barnes, Kristen Lindquist, Betsy Sholl, Candice Stover and Elizabeth Tibbetts. All five are seasoned writers with distinctive voices; all five are at the top of their form this time around.

Kate Barnes, the state’s first poet laureate (she handed the title to Baron Wormser a couple of years ago), offers “The Rhetoric of Fiction,” a sequence of 12 poems – she calls them chapters – that first appeared in the New England Review in 1994. A quote from poet Louise Bogan printed on the back of the book alerts us to the nature of the work: “No woman should be ashamed if, in her writing, she tries to give back to the world a portion of its lost heart.”

In a blend of allegory and raw truth, Barnes relates the history of an abusive relationship, from seduction to battering, from illusion to disillusion and back. The writing is concise and strong, as in the four lines that make up “Chapter Nine: The Past”: “The past is the severed head/of a rattlesnake./It can still/give a mortal bite.”

Rockland-based Kristen Lindquist, whose poetry has won several awards, including the 1992 Breadloaf Poetry Prize, draws on travel, nature, memory and relationships for the 15 poems in “Invocation to the Birds.” She often evokes the past: a skinny-dip in chill water with a grandmother, smelting with her stepfather when she is 9, a visit to the Isle of Skye at 14. Her eye for the elements of the wild, especially winged creatures, is remarkable. “Cormorants preened and dried, wings spread/wide, unable to hide all that water” is one of many felicitous observations.

Forms of music – jazz, opera, the rock ‘n’ roll classic “Louie, Louie” – provide the foundation for the poems in “Coastal Bop” by Betsy Sholl of Portland. Sometimes the poetry actually emulates the musical genre, as in the title poem’s dynamic syncopations. Sholl’s language is often onomatopoetic: fritz, dazzle, screech. In the poem “The Life of Keats, Spared Briefly by Coltrane,” she brings together cultural icons living centuries apart in an inventive and memorable manner.

Sholl has an awareness of social issues. So does Elizabeth Tibbetts, who draws on her experiences as a nurse for a number of poems in “Perfect Selves.” In “Eighty-Five,” “Institution” and “A Nurse Reads A Book of Luminous Things,” she writes movingly of the elderly and the mentally ill, while in “Home Visit” she recounts a scary confrontation with a rifle-wielding man. Favorites here are the brilliant “Ida Goes to the Hens” and the wistfully humorous “After a Dark Winter.”

Candice Stover, who lives on Mount Desert Island, won the 1994 Maine Writers & Publishers Chapbook Award for “Holding Patterns.” In “Another Stopping Place,” she explores those “questions of travel” that intrigued Elizabeth Bishop. “Seven Postcards from Portugal,” which originally appeared in The Puckerbrush Review, consists of verse reports from the Iberian Peninsula. Stonework in a cemetery, oil-painted panels that adorn a Portuguese church – sense of place is captured through an engaging inventory. Stover’s poetry is also marked by a sense of empathy as she connects with the people around her or contemplates the figure in a painting by Diego Rivera.

There’s something to be said for slim volumes of verse, especially these five: Read them.

Lindquist, Tibbetts, Barnes and Stover will read from their work at the Rockport Opera House at 2 p.m. Saturday, April 28. The reading is presented by the Live Poets Society.