Campbell McGrath’s XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century (Ecco $25.99) may remind some readers of Billy Joel’s 1989 song, “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” minus the driving bass line and rapid-fire allusions. McGrath’s rich poems, one for each year, feature innovators, leaders, and cultural icons, such as Henry Ford, August Sander, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Nelson Mandela, as well as pivotal events, including Hiroshima and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The work is expansive, providing enough information that readers understand the facts of each story and its impact before the writing takes wing, becoming more insightful and poetic. In the fifth and last section, the poet seems to speak through the material, as in these lines from “To Hector Viel Temperley” (1982): “To the poets of the future/ I make but one request on your behalf: don’t just sing it like you mean it./ Mean it./ Then sing it.” The richness of the book, which occasionally feels ponderous, comes from McGrath’s deep understanding of history — especially the latter part of the century– and his ability to choose memories that will resonate with readers, as with the debate between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and the birth of Dolly, the cloned sheep.

[Best poetry collections of 2015]

Admit One: An American Scrapbook (Pittsburgh; paperback, $15.95) by Martha Collins is a strikingly original collection that combines brilliant storytelling and compelling commentary on ethics and race. The interwoven poems begin with the speaker’s grandparents entering the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, where technological advances and artistic marvels were proudly displayed, as were examples of “inferior” human beings, such as Ota Benga, a Congolese Pygmy who was later housed in the primate exhibit of the new Bronx Zoo. The poems follow his short, sad life and the rise of Madison Grant, a hunter friend of Theodore Roosevelt who created the zoo. Grant later became a key proponent of the eugenics movement. Collins, who has published seven previous books of poetry, doesn’t sensationalize the material. Exquisitely spare, these works recount some of the sinister moments of American history, quietly pushing readers to learn from those episodes and consider our collective responsibility for them. As she writes in “Admit/Admit”: “hate to have to concede/ as evidence into the record/ we have to guilt mistake own/ as a right openly into.”

"Admit One: An American Scrapbook" by Martha Collins (Univ. of Pittsburgh)

Lucia Perillo’s Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, $23) is a significant retrospective that includes work from her six previous books, including generous selections from “Inseminating the Elephant” (2010), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and “On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths,” a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for 2012. Fans will recognize her signature style – accessible, attuned to the small dramas in people’s lives, and at times witheringly funny. They will also find familiar themes: the delights of nature, the frailty of the physical world and the many ways the human body lets people down. The book shows Perillo’s ability to balance the timely and the timeless, and to capture some of the struggles that all humans face, regardless of when or where they live. In the title poem, one of the new pieces, the speaker notes that “Every heart sings a song that’s incomplete/ said Plato, until another heart whispers back./ He forgot PS: the song might not be sweet.” Yet as she observed a few pages earlier, “The gray is common; it’s the glitter that’s rare.” Perillo’s work makes both shimmer.

Elizabeth Lund writes about poetry every month for The Washington Post.