In Greek mythology and popular legend, Orpheus is the musician, the poet, who could charm all with his music. Possibly the son of a king and the muse Calliope, he was one of Jason’s Argonauts; he is said to have perfected the lyre; and is credited as the composed of the Orphic Hymns, some of which survives today. He occupies an important position in Western literary culture, and has been the subject of paintings, poems, operas and many musical compositions.

One of the best known stories about Orpheus concerns his wife Eurydice. Startled by a satyr at their wedding, she falls into a nest of vipers and dies. Orpheus travels to the Underworld, and is allowed to bring her back on the condition that he not look at her until they have departed Hades and reached the upper world. He looks back too soon, of course, and Eurydice is lost forever.

Matthew Duggan, a British poet, has retold the story of Orpheus in Underworld: The Modern Orpheus, a series of 16 poems published as an e-book in late July. This Orpheus is no Greek of mythological time, but a contemporary man, in contemporary times.

And the story is just as haunting, unfolding in a series of images and scenes that are both familiar and mythological.

This Orpheus has turned 40, and his “birthday balloons drift, / like the years had quickened with time / from hardships passed to rare moments of bliss.” He has traveled far and long to find love, and he does ultimately find her, only to lose her: “…her colourful corpse lay with wingless priests / so far from the reaches of love’s blessed arms…”

As Orpheus seeks his love, even the muses weep in what is a moving, lyrical passage that illustrates the language of the entire work:

…a hunched weeping muse collects her tears
like the frequent pebbles that span a beach.
In the dead fields of weathered corn
she rests well under dappled skies of canvas,
in prayer she weeps for songs of hope
from the ghosts and gods that glisten the night.

It is Duggan’s description of Hades that sounds so familiar, so modern, a contemporary urban landscape:

In the realms of the city of the dead
the warrior of song takes a deep breath,
in charcoal towers with skies of coarse red.
Searching the high-streets burnt and bled
in old cafes of timeless death,
in the realms of the city of the dead.

In a city coloured with glossed lead…

In this Hades of “neon skyscrapers,” Orpheus finds himself a player on the stage, following the script written out for him to its inevitable conclusion. He has no choice, really; his fate has been laid out before him.

Duggan has done something wonderful here with this retelling of an old, old story. He’s given it a modern sensibility while remaining true to its mythological origins. And he’s done so using beautiful lines and images that continue to haunt long after the reading is done.

In June, poet Anne Overstreet published her first collection of poems, entitled Delicate Machinery Suspended: Poems. It is about memory and faith, affection and love, work done and work done well, and even playfulness. The poems are about a life observed, but also a life to come. It’s a beautiful work.

Anne’s poems have been published in the Asheville Poetry Review, Radix, DMQ Review, Relief, Talking River Review and several other publications. She is a Soapstone Resident and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. She’s conducted a number of workshops, and her poetry has appeared as part of the Cody Center Exhibition “Pairings” at Laity Lodge in Texas. She lives near Seattle with her husband, author and film critic Jeffrey Overstreet.

We talked with Anne about her poetry, her background and experiences, and the influences on her writing.

Your “home place” — New Mexico — plays an important role in your poems. Can you tell us a little about your background and growing up there?

We actually relocated to Roswell when I was 12 and I remember driving cross-country in the yellow Oldsmobile, muttering under my breath that I was going to hate it hate it hate it there. Now I can’t imagine feeling as connected to any other place the same way. You’re walking on the skin of the earth, moving through the heavens where it touches down. I imagine God breathing and this place is that held space between inhalation and exhalation. Such subtle beauty—you have to be alert to catch spring slipping quietly along the rivers, spilling green across the plains. I used to lie on the ground at Salt Creek and could swear I felt the earth turning. There’s no place like it.

Prior to New Mexico, we moved a fair bit because my dad was in the Army when we were young. Mostly parts of Virginia. Certain rituals provided continuity across the states and into Roswell, where my parents still live. Reading as a family was one. Camping in the mountains. Sundays were for church and feeding people.

In the Acknowledgements, you cite Luci Shaw and several others for helping you be a better writer. How did they do that?

Luci advocates for confidence in one’s work, one’s own voice. I’d say she was my poetic fairy godmother, but I’m not sure godmothers have tattoos and sport leather jackets. Linda has one of the clearest senses of vision I’ve ever encountered and has leant me her eye when I needed it. Stacey listens. Then she tells me what she’s heard, how she experiences what I’ve written. She doesn’t read a lot of poetry—she’s in my sci-fi/fantasy cohort— and she has a fresh ear. Plus, she’s a mean cook. And everyone needs someone who helps make room for you to get your work done, who protects that space. She does that. Derek has been a mentor and a teacher for years. I learn from his work every time I encounter it. There is a balance to every piece he writes that I’d like to achieve. He also sets the bar high for intelligent critique, something I hope I have learned from, and he never hesitates to give his support any time it is asked for.

Who are some of your favorite writers and poets?

Oh that’s an extensive list that is perpetually expanding! Annie Dillard—everything. I will also read anything Kathleen Norris writes. Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale is at the top of the list, as is much of Guy Gavriel Kay’s work, Patricia McKillip’s novels, and the Auralia’s Thread books (yep, I’m a fan of Jeffrey’s work). I’m a big fantasy and fairy tale buff and these authors write gorgeous prose, lyrical and surprising. The kind that stuns you, pulls you under and out into a different state of being.

Poetry, hmm, Pattiann Rogers, Maxine Kumin, Jane Hirschfiedl, Zbiegneiw Herbert, Adam Zagejewski (I particularly like the Polish poets of that period), to begin with. Rogers does this exquisite blending of the divine and science that celebrates fact and design, and yet holds something wild in it. Two of my northwest favorites are Derek Sheffield, whose work is keen, swift, and well-balanced, and Kevin Miller, who, though he has only a few collections out, does place so well. There is a reverence too for the holiness of the ordinary in his poems. These are writers I am in conversation with, at least on page, who I learn from, whose work elicits a response or a question every time I encounter it.

Many of the poems read like a movie camera filming a scene, then shifting to another scene, and then another, effectively (very effectively) combining three or four scenes into a cohesive whole, like in “If It Doesn’t Rain Soon.” Is film/movies an influence here?

You’d expect me to say yes, since my husband Jeffrey is a film critic. And the films I am most drawn to are often image heavy. However, I do think that is a consequence, not a cause or influence. As an undergraduate I studied history and loved reading various texts on one subject, looking at the event from differing perspectives to apprehend the whole. I think I still do that in my poetry.

Faith plays a strong role in your poetry, even when it’s subtle and understated. It’s straightforward in poems like “The Logic of Prayer Rising” and “Annunciation: Triptych” (two of my favorites in the collection) and “The Bearded Lady, Asleep,” but it’s present throughout the poems, which seem to suggest a belief in the order and purpose of things. How would you describe it?

It informs the way I see. Because of it, it is clear to me that we move through a designed world. Moreover, the designer seems so obviously to delight in artistry and variation, in evolutionary innovation. Scientists have recently discovered a shark whose underbelly mimics patterns of light falling through water so that it is virtually invisible from below. How cool is that? We keep discovering. Creation keeps unfolding. God continues to speak it into being, a proper artist.

My faith also gives me permission to ask questions. Scott Cairns talks about poetry being a continuing conversation, a response or reaction perhaps to the poetic tradition. Writing’s my way of engaging with my faith tradition. What do we do with apparent anomalies, like a person who appears to be both male and female, as in “The Bearded Lady”? How could Mary be the same after having been overshadowed by the same spirit that overshadowed the waters and drew the land masses up out of the deep? That sort of thing.

Maybe I am not entitled to answers, but I am free to ask. And ask and ask. Job is a favorite text, as are some of the Psalms. I think we’re supposed to raise questions as part of the conversation, even in the face of doubt, perhaps especially in the face of silence.

Related:

At The High Calling, Anne talks about how she came to write poetry, how various jobs she’s held influenced her writing, and how she uses details to make her poems so powerful.

At Faith, Fiction, Friends, Anne discusses some of the specific poems in the collection.

You can read a review of Delicate Machinery Suspended: Poems here at TweetSpeak Poetry.

In his letters, the Apostle Paul usually addresses the churches, such as the churches at Corinth and Thessalonica. In his letters to the Ephesians and the Philippians, Paul speaks to the “saints.” Peter speaks to “God’s elect.” But while different terms are used, all are generally understood to mean the people – the living people – who comprised the churches in these cities. When Paul wrote to the saints in Ephesus and Philippi, he was not addressing people who had been recognized and canonized as something special and different after their deaths. And so too today, in most of the Protestant traditions (Anglican and Episcopal being obvious exceptions), the terms “saints” refers to the living, breathing members of the church.

And then there’s Saint Sinatra.

I have to say that I laughed when I saw the title of this collection of poems by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell. I’ve never really considered Frank Sinatra a saint, even in his early singing career when young women (like my mother) swooned over those famous blue eyes. Yet his poem, the title poem, leads this volume. And it should.

It is a collection that is at once serious and humorous, focused and yet playful. It speaks to and about saints who are both familiar and known for being saints (like “St. Kate,” or Catherine of Siena), as well as those who are not – like St. Ikaros, the mythical Icarus who flew too close to the sun. And O’Donnell includes a variety of literary figures to populate her saintly domain here – like St. Seamus (Heaney, the poet), St. Melville and St. Hawthorne, St. Edna (Vincent Millay) and St. Emily (Dickinson).

The idea here seems to be that these figures are all saints, have all been found worthy of sainthood, be that for singing, writing, painting (Van Gogh and Turner) and even playing the saxophone (Clarence Clemmons, who played with Brice Springsteen.)

The poem entitled St. Seamus, for the Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner, is a kind of praise and giving thanks psalm, and is an indication of how O’Donnell has written and organized her poems.

St. Seamus

For years I’ve knelt at your holy wells
and envied the cut of your clean-edged song,
lain down in the bog where dead men dwell,
grieved with ghosts who told their wrongs.

Your consonants cleave my soft palate.
I taste their music and savor it long
past the last line of the taut sonnet.
Its rhyming subtle, its accent strong.

And every poem speaks a sacrament,
blood of blessing, bread of the word,
feeding me full in language ancient
as Aran’s rock and St. Kevin’s birds.

English will never be the same.
To make it ours is why you came.

There is much to plumb in this poem, not the least of which is the connection between art and faith, or how art expresses faith, and how faith is revealed in art.

The poems in the volume are not limited to saints; there is also one called “The Conversation,” which is almost like a news account of the one face-to-face meeting of Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, and the Polish-Lithuanian-American Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. The two had corresponded for years: their one meeting was a in a restaurant in San Francisco in 1968, and it is imaginatively recreated by O’Donnell here, including these lines:

He made me Milosz, you Merton,
and neither of us home
and sent us on a pilgrimage to find it.
We have seen on our way and fallen in love
With the world that will pass in a twinkling.
The maker loves the maker and the made.

Other poems include O’Donnell’s responses to seeing Vincent Van Gogh’s “Sower with Setting Sun” on the feast day of St. Francis and an exhibition of paintings by J.M. W. Turner at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

O’Donnell teaches English, Creative Writing and American Catholic Studies at Fordham University in New York City. She’s previously published two chapbooks and a full-length collection of poems, Moving House. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Christian Century, Comstock Poetry Review, Potomac Review and Xavier Review, among many others. She’s also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Web Prize, and was finalist for the Foley Poetry Award, the Elixir First Book award and the Mulberry Poets & Writers Award.

And in Saint Sinatra, she’s given us the poetry of the saints, all of the saints, including those who are recognizably ourselves.
____

Subscribe to Every Day Poems— read a poem a day with us, become a better poet or teach others to become better poets.

Nicholas Samaras received the award in the 1991 for the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition for this volume of poetry, Hands of the Saddlemaker. Now 20 years old, it has aged well; its themes of exile, pilgrimage, separation and “in this world but not of it” are as current now as they were then, if not more so.

Perhaps these themes reflect his upbringing as the son of a leading Greek Orthodox bishop who moved his family from England to Massachusetts, or Samaras’ own life later in New York. Whatever the influence, his poems project a sense of distance and separation at the same time suggesting a quality of knowing exactly one’s place. In “Lost,” for example, Samaras places his couple in a dark woods, away from civilization, as the forest “thickens with night.” Yet when they awake early the next morning, it may still be dark, but they know their pilgrimage is resuming:

Lost

The one thing warned against
we have accomplished with remarkable ease.
The path dissolves to darkness.
The forest thickens with night as we fumble
with sweat-dampened matches to set a fire.
On the mountain-slope, wolves chuck their moon-song.
Wild boards rummage the underbrush.
They are far enough away for us to breathe.

I watch while Nikita sleeps, shudders awake
To a blind hour. Embers glimmer a dull red.
Our clothes are limp with smoke
and we prop a paper icon against a tree stump,
chant an ancient tongue to God, tell ourselves
this is the way of all pilgrims.
But oh, how our arms ache
from holding the carvings of our own ribs.

In “In the Wake of Exile,” this sense of separation and “separate-ness” is more explicit, as is the setting of the poem. One imagines a kind of prisoner being taking away from the familiar and the loving, or perhaps the pilgrim, who sleeps in a ship’s cabin that is much like a monk’s cell.

In the Wake of Exile

You have been in exile for two weeks.

Boarding the boat that takes you,
you are somewhere far off,
forgetting something,
stitching through a necklace of islands.
It is the journey you make in winter.
The moaning of engines, the heavy
Rumble below deck on a black-onyx sea.
You do not eat, and grow invisible.
Stripped of everything,
you sleep like this:
In a berth the size of your body,
your face stubbed into the lumpy pillow,
your left palm cradling
your bruised testicles.
The string of light fades in the hazy black.
The long beard you said goodbye to.
The long beard you know you are becoming.
The book you translate in your sleep.
On gaunt legs that feel unlike yours,
you leave the cabin and haunt the deck.
Stern-side, the waning moon
puddles in the froth of the wake.
Peer into darkness.
Write this star down.

These and the others in the collection are poems of pilgrimage and exile, where we are all strangers, to each other and to ourselves. Or as he concludes in the poem “When Grandfathers Leave,” when the patrons of a tavern finally return home, “Each stranger’s expression and / cheekbones, a mirror of mine.”

Hands of the Saddlemaker is a quiet volume, fully deserving of rereading and contemplation.

Related:

The TweetSpeak Poetry feature on Nick Samaras for National Poetry Month.

A short study of a poem from this volume, published at The Master’s Artist.

Artist of the Month feature at Image Journal.

When I was little, my mother would read stories to me from an oversized yet relatively thin edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. It had a green cloth cover, and I remember it specifically because I still have it. (It’s also decorated with writing in crayon, but that’s another story.)

One of my favorite stories was “Hansel and Gretel.” Now I know a lot of right-thinking people frown on fairy tales like “Hansel and Gretel,” but it made good sense to me then, and still makes good sense to me now. Two children get lost in the woods, find a gingerbread house, do what any hungry child would do and eat a piece, and get imprisoned by the wicked witch, who plans on doing what wicked witches always do, and that’s to eat them. Hansel is kept in a cage to fatten him up, and Gretel is worked to the bone, until she eventually seizes the opportunity to push the witch into the oven. Yes! Good triumphs over evil! The wicked witch is burned to a crisp!

Poet Ava Levall Haymon has taken the story of Hansel and Gretel and turned it into an extraordinary series of poems in Why the House is Made of Gingerbread: Poems. Together, the poems form a significant retelling of the story, but one that remains true to the original. It is the story of Gretel, and contemporary housewife and mother, who finds herself absorbed into the fairy tale and living the story of the child Gretel.

Haymon weaves an amazing tale, and the transition to the fairy tale starts gradually. From the poem “Autobiography:”

Gretel’s attention disengages from her driving
and she is the young girl in the dark
beside Hansel’s cage, legs aching from standing
since before dawn. Gretel squeezes
the wheel, shoulders tight, longing

to trade places with her brother,
for his ignorance of minding the fire,
hauling water with bruised fingers,
his freedom from the danger of failure – one slip
of the girl’s memory in a recipe, one broken dish

and there’s no story, just another couple of kids
who never came home. A ruckus breaks out
in the back seat, and Gretel shudders back
into the present, driving kids to school.
She presses the brake hard: That didn’t happen!

But it did happen and it does happen, and soon she finds herself the original Gretel, captive with her brother by the witch, with their doom creeping ever closer. From “The Witch Has Told You a Story:”

You are food.
You are here for me
to eat. Fatten up,
and I will like you better.

Your brother will be first,
You must wait your turn.
Feed him yourself, you will
Learn to do it. You will take him

Eggs with yellow sauce, muffins
Torn apart and leaking butter, friend meats
Late in the morning, and always sweets
In a sticky parade from the kitchen…

Haymon guides her Gretel into a gradual identification with her captor, wnile her brother turns into something fattened up for dinner. But the story is told true to the original, and it’s the witch who meets her doom, even if Gretel will carry some of that witch with her, and back into her real housewife life.

Haymon, who teaches poetry writing and directs a writer’s retreat in New Mexico, is the author of two previous collections, Kitchen Heat and The Strict Economy of Fire. In Why the House is Made of Gingerbread, she has creatively translated a fairy tale into both a faithful and imaginative retelling and a modern story, its own fairy tale.

In 2009, we reviewed here a chapbook published by poet John Estes entitled Breakfast with Blake at the Lacoon. In the review we said that Estes effectively evoked a sense of both the literary and everyday reality. That same characteristic is true of his first collection of poems, Kingdom Come: Poems, published by CR Press, but even more so: Estes is refining his art, honing and polishing his poems to create a mirrored reflection of ourselves.

The poems are structured in four sections and an interlude: “in which love and art seek their measure;” ”in which he marries;” “in which a child is conceived and born;” the interlude called “Home Cosmographies;” and “in which they seek the measure of art and love.” This structure is important, suggesting both a circular movement and well as development and growth, a filling out of a life that is young and new and beginning to mature.

It’s fascinating to see how Estes combines images and even realities, using each to highlight and frame the other. In “A List of What is Found,” for example, he tells a story of traveling to Kansas to conduct an inventory of a bookstore, an inventory framed by an old train rail bed and which in turns frames what’s on the news:

A List of What Is Found

The old Burlington
Northern rail bed touches
the southern edge
of the yard
not a hundred feet
from where we’re staying—
a ghostly, trackless
river of gray gravel
embowered by cottonwood
and hedge, thickened
with pines and red cedar.
Our hosts tell us—
as two wrens zip around
rebuilding their
poorly placed
nest the Doberman
ate babies-and-all—
how an easterly wind would
blow the approaching
rumble off and so a throbbing
hulk of diesel engine
towing 100+ coal cars
could suddenly darken
their back deck,
a paracletic comfort
(in retrospect, at least)
abandoned for a bike trail.

I’ve come to Kansas
to do a job,
to inventory a store of books—
the endangered kind
housed in old Victorians
where light switches
hide behind Kierkegaard
and the bathroom is
a stockroom stockpiling
stacks of bargain-buy lectures
on Aquinas on Aristotle,
titles they account for
in years per turn
not turns per year—
which means forsaking books
to better address
the shelf-worn menace
of our bourgeois
contentment.
An old copy of Thoreau
sits on the stand
calling out alongside
other diluted (i.e., textual)
libidinal oppositions:
bloodless
and rational words
of institution
that mock a project’s
scope and scale
but safeguard a life,
so designed, of convention.

On the news:
in the desert outskirts
of an Iraqi town,
the so-called Triangle of Death,
a patrol is ambushed:
five dead—
3389, 3390, 3391, 3392, 3393—
three unaccounted for.
Our host descends
to remind us over 3000 die
worldwide each day
in car crashes.

Estes write from his own experience, and that experience is easily recognizable – the husband, the father, the handyman, the house repairman, the guy dealing hail damage to his roof and car or taking out an insurance policy on his child. In “This Poem is Carbon Neutral,” Estes addresses what it means to be a neighbor, suggesting a kind of trade-off akin to Frost and his “good friends make good neighbors:”

This Poem Is Carbon Neutral

Across the street they think
we’re eco-Kool-Aid drinkers: we sort glass and plastics
into blue bags, organics into clear ones, stuff
paper into paper sacks then treat
everything else like garbage.

But he thinks I’m a good neighbor,
and since we mend no fences I stop short of thinking
he’s like Frost’s old-stone savage
despite the Pall Malls
billowing with grandkids in the backseat,
windows up, despite the herbicide
and fungicide and fertilizer
liberally broadcast fall and spring. We wave
and shout news across the way though I suspect
he’s deaf.

Otherwise our lifeworlds
barely intersect, our privacies mutually assured
except for now and again
when an egg is borrowed, or if the wind litters
his greensward with my recycling—
a magazine blow-in card or a pitched draft
or a crumpled receipt.
Once they walked across to inspect
then carried back a worn-out bookshelf we’d discarded.

Now and again I pop their cat
with a pellet gun to chase him off our feeders.
But when the trash trucks come
each Monday,
doing their slow-maw grinding action-non-action thing
and one truck stops for him
and one truck stops for me, we offset,
we reset, we’re zero-sum.

Several of the poems were previously published in publications like Southern Review, Wallace Stevens Journal, American Poetry Journal, Dos Passos Review, New Delta Review and New Orleans Review, among several others, as well as from an earlier chapbook entitled Swerve, which was published as a National Chapbook Fellowship of the Poetry Society of America and C.K. Williams. Together, these poems form a deeply satisfying and outstanding collection.

The poems of Kingdom Come are polished, almost chiseled to refinement, painstakingly written to use exactly the right word, the right line, the right idea. Estes is clear about what he is doing; as he says in “Object Permanance,” “What’s a poem / for, anyway, if not to make the empty / spaces habitable?” And his poems make the empty spaces habitable, the empty spaces that are everyday life.

You can find John Estes’ web site here. He is an assistant professor of English and driector of Creative Writing at Malone University in Ohio.

Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955) was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and the New York Law School, and worked for most of his life as an attorney with the Hartford Insurance Company and its predecessors, and was a vice president at the time of his death. (He turned down a faculty position at Harvard since it would have required him to quit his vice presidency at the Hartford.)

A leading light of the American Modernism, Stevens published nine collections of poetry, including Collected Poems (1954), which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Four collections were published after his death, as were three collections of his letters. His poetry influenced such poets as James Merrill, Donald Justice, John Hollander, John Ashberry, Jorie Graham and many others.

This poem is from Opus Posthumous, published in 1957.

The Sick Man

Bands of black men seem to be drifting in the air,
In the South, bands of thousands of black men,
Playing mouth organs in the night or, now, guitars.

Here in the North, late, late, there are voices of men,
Voices in chorus, singing without words, remote and deep,
Drifting choirs, long movements and turnings of sounds.

And in a bed in one room, alone, a listener
Waits for the unison of the music of the drifting bands
And the dissolving chorals, waits for it and imagines

The words of winter in which these two will come together,
In the ceiling of the distant room, in which he lies,
The listener, listening to the shadows, seeing them,

Choosing out of himself, out of everything within him,
Speech for the quiet, good hail of himself, good hail, good hail,
The peaceful, blissful words, well-tuned, well-sung, well-spoken.

Billy Collins has been called the most popular living poet in America, and with good reason: he’s been more than a little successful as a poet, which in some literary quarters is rather unforgiveable.

Collins has been U.S. Poet Laureate twice (2001 and 2002) and New York Poet Laureate (2004); received fellowships for the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for Arts and the John Guggenheim Foundation; was named Poet of the Year by Poetry magazine in 1994; and received the Mark Twain Award for Humor in poetry, among many other honors and distinctions. He is Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College in the Bronx. Collins was born in 1941 in New York City, received his B.A. degree from College of the Holy Cross and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California-Riverside. He has published 13 collections of poems and had served as editor for three anthologies.

This poem is from The Trouble with Poetry (2005).

The Lodger

After I had beaten my sword into a ploughshare,
I beat my ploughshare into a hoe,
then beat the hoe into a fork,
which I used to eat my dinner alone.

And when I had finished dinner,
I beat my fork into a toothpick,
which I twirled on my lips
then flicked over a low stone wall

as I walked along the city river
under the clouds and stars,
quite happy but for the thought
that I should have beaten that toothpick into a shilling

so I could buy a newspaper to read
after climbing the stairs to my room.

Marcus Goodyear is senior editor for TheHighCalling.org (sponsored by Foundations for Laity Renewal) and FaithintheWorkplace.com (sponsored by Christianity Today). His poetry has been published in Geez Magazine, 32 Poems and Stonework Journal. Barbies at Communion: and other poems, his first volume of poetry, was published in 2010 and selected as a notable book by Englewood Review of Books. He blogs at Good Word Editing.

This poem is from Barbies at Communion.

Parable of the Sower

Judgment comes like weeds
in a lawn where the mower
sets his machine so low
it scalps the grass
and makes room for ugly
broad leaf and dollar weeds
and worse – prickles and stickers
that turn the outside wild
again, a place we can’t walk
bare foot. Slip-on sandals
aren’t even enough unless
our feet calluses are so thick we can’t feel
the spines and poisons against
the sides of our soles.
But then we plow through fields
like grounded bees spreading seed,
sowing forms of life we’d never choose,
the fallen world redeemed by our shoes.

Related:

Marcus Goodyear’s interview with TweetSpeak Poetry.

Reviews of Barbies at Communion at Amazon.com.

Pablo Neruda was the pen name of Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto (1904-1973), a Chilean poet and diplomat whom Gabriel Garcia Marquez called “the great poet of the 20th century in any language.” The article on him at Wikipedia contains a wealth of information about his life, family, involvement in the Spanish Civil War, embrace and later rejection of Stalinism, the speech he made in Chile in 1948 which forced him into hiding and then exile, and many other facets of his life. The Poetry Foundation also has a good profile on the poet, as does poets.org.

An interesting note: the 1994 Italian movie Il Postino (The Postman) is a story of how a postman’s life is changed when he strikes up a friendship with a poet in exile on Sardinia – and that poet is Pablo Neruda, who indeed spent several years of exile there.

The author of numerous works of poetry, Neruda received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. This poem is taken from 100 Love Sonnets, or Cien sonetos de amor, which Neruda dedicated to his wife, Matilde Urrutia (the poems were translated by Stephen Tapscott and published by the University of Texas Press).

Sonnet LXXIII

Maybe you’ll remember that razor-faced man
who slipped out from the dark like a blade
and – before we realized – knew what was there:
he saw smoke and concluded fire.

The pallid woman with black hair
rose like a fish from the abyss,
and the two of them built up a contraption,
armed to the teeth, against love.

Man and woman, they felled mountains and gardens,
they went down to the river, the scaled the walls,
they hoisted their atrocious artillery up the hill.

Then love knew it was called love.
And when I lifted my eyes to your name,
Suddenly your heart showed me my way.

L.L. Barkat is a writer, editor, poet, columnist, speaker and entrepreneur. She is the author of Stone Crossings: Finding Grace in Hard and Hidden Places, God in the Yard: Spiritual Practice for the Rest of Us, and InsideOut: Poems. Barkat is Managing Editor at The High Calling and staff writer for International Arts Movement’s The Curator. She’s also a co-editor here at TweetSpeak Poetry.

This poem is taken from InsideOut: Poems, published in 2009 by International Arts Movement.

Foyer

Who looks
at the new straw
hat, remembering
Grandma,

how she beat
brazen rays each
day by sneaking
under a brim

like that. And who
notices the wrought
iron roses now
hung askew

on our cherry
coat rack; she
wrung pits
out of red fruit

too, swatted flies,
rolled tart sweet
flesh, juice into
crust, but that is

another story;
I am asking you
about the roses
broken, and a

missing screw,
but you are busy
arranging tailored
black wool on

a cool hook worn
brass blue, we’re
just in the hall,
after all, we’re just

passing through.

The career of William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) spanned two centuries, and he became one of the foremost figures of English literature. He was a major force behind the Irish Literary Revival and was a co-founder of the famed Abbey Theater in Dublin. Active in politics, drama and literature, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923. Born in Dublin, he died in France and is buried there.

This poem is taken from Early Poems, published in 1993 as a Dover Thrift Edition. Much of his early poetry was influenced by Irish folklore and myth.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavement’s gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) wrote poetry for more than 70 years, and has the distinction of being the first black author to win the Pulitzer Prize (in 1950 for Annie Allen: Poems). She also received numerous other honors and recognitions, including a nomination for the National Book Award, the National Medal for the Arts, serving as poet laureate of Illinois and poet laureate of the United States, the Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and more than 75 honorary degrees from colleges and universities.

This poem is from Selected Poems (2006) but was first published in The Bean Eaters (1960).

A Lonely Love

Let it be alleys. Let it be a hall
Whose janitor javelins epithet and thought
To cheapen hyacinth darkness that we sought
And played we found, rot, make the petals fall.
Let it be stairways, and a splintery box
Where you have thrown me, scraped me with your kiss,
Have honed me, have released me after this
Cavern kindness, smiled away our shocks.
That is the birthright of our lonely love
In swaddling clothes. Not like that Other one.
Not lit by any fondling star above.
Not found by any wise man, either. Run.
People are coming. They must not catch us here
Definitionless in this strict atmosphere.

Brendan Galvin has published 21 books and chapbooks of poetry. He graduated from Boston College in 1960 with a B.S. degree in the natural sciences, and received his MFA and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Massachusetts. One work, Atlantic Flyway (1980) was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize and Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005 (2005) was a National Book Award finalist.

Many of Galvin’s poems reflect his interest and background in the nature and the natural sciences. “Pollen” was first published in Great Blue: New and Selected Poems in 1990 and included in Habitat in 2005.

“Pollen”

As when a breeze
slips off the water
and crosses a headland,
and even those limp zeroes
wavelets make, fragile as
smoke rings, erase themselves
from the viscid surface,
and sails slacken,
so the air
this afternoon slackens,
and the page blurs
under your eyes
as the massive invisible
orgy of flower
quickening flower
sifts through the atmosphere,
drifts at its peak,
rose to rose,
and from the roadside locust trees
birds stagger, drunk,
daring tires, kneeling in the grass.

Insistent as midges, grains
tease at your nostrils,
and you cry onto the page
for no human reason.
And if somewhere
a boy’s arm breaks the chains
of this lassitude
long enough
to toss a stone at a squirrel,
that pine exploding into gold
tilts you toward sleep
lightly. You whisper
how wings and the shadows of
wings circle you,
surrounding the years.

Richard Beban spent 30 years as a journalist and televisiona nd screen writer, and then became a poet. Since 1994, his poetryhad been published in numerous literary journals and websites and in 16 anthologies. He’s also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and co-authored numerous non-fiction books and collections. He and his wife, writer Kaaren Kitchell, live in Los Angeles.

His three published books of poetry include I Burn for You (1999), What the Heart Weighs (2004) and Young Girl Eating a Bird (2006). This poem is taken from What the Heart Weighs.

My Parents Watch the July Fourth Parade

Perhaps they were both dyslexic;
never clear on the difference
between marital & martial.
Thought the wedding march was
by John Phillip Sousa or Francis
Scott Key – bombs bursting in
the living room, kitchen, beat of
muffled drums, sharp staccato
racket of sticks on rims, crack of
ribs, crack of small arms fire,
small children abandoned in the
corners like spent shell casings.
The stars & stripes forever
imprinted – stars as blows hit the
skull, stripes from the slashing leather
belt across the backs of thighs. Red
welts, white skin, blue bruises never
shown at school where you stood for the
Pledge of Allegiance & learned how fine
a country this is & why our parents fought
so hard to keep it free. Learned the price
of war was high, but teacher said it
was worth it. Look at all we had
that children in other countries wanted.

Caroline Dellosso may be the youngest poet you’ve never heard of, but you will hear of her one day. She’s eight years old, and she’s started to write poetry. Her dad, author Mike Dellosso, decided to post a couple of her poems on his web site, and we were so impressed with what a good poet she already is that we decided to feature her here for National Poetry Month. Caroline lives with her family in Pennsylvania.

We have two poems by Caroline Dellosso.

                    Me In the Mirror
              My reflection in the mirror
                     Told me one day.
                           “I’ll see you.”
                          And he did.
              One day I walked past him
                      And we both said,
             “Wait, where is my mom?”
                      And finally I said,
         “Oh, she went to the bathroom,
         Lets’ talk about something else.”
                     And he said, “OK.”
        I said, “Let’s talk about you doing
               Everything I do and say.”
                                                                               “No way!”
                                                                            Sigh, oh well.

           Ants in My Pants
       I have ants in my pants,
                  I really do.
    They’re always laying eggs.
         They run in my pants
        And it tickles, because
       I have ants in my pants!
    And the ants aren’t moving
            to different pants.
        My mom doesn’t believe
         I have ants in my pants.
I said, “I never changed my pants,
                                                    That’s why
                                           I have ants in my pants!”

David Wheeler is a musician, essayist and poet. He’s produced an album entitled “There, There” and his writing has appeared at the Burnside Writers collective, The Morning News, the Pacific Northwest Reader (an essay collection) and The High Calling. He blogs at Dave Writes Right.

His first collection, Contingency Plans: Poems, published in 2010, was named to the Longlist of the Indie Booksellers Awards. This poem is taken from that collection.

Awake! Revival

And once these modern day fatigues are burned
we’ll start undrawing drapes and leave them piled
against the empty bureau drawers; unfiled
manila documents; disturbed, upturned,
and potted plants; corroded lanterns; urns
that spill their contents; shattered marble tiles;
and hardwood planks misshaped and warped; all while
we dress in tails for me, and you, couture.

Our drowse abandoned altogether there
is left to blaze along with everything;
and, we in motorcade display arrive
atop the high-rise over everywhere
to see the beacon light and rising string
of smoke from our unraveled former lives.

Related:

Talking with David Wheeler, interview at Faith, Fiction, Friends.

The Real Wonder of Writing is Alchemy, interview at The High Calling.

An Interview with David Wheeler, here at TweetSpeak Poetry.

Review of Contingency Plans at Faith, Fiction, Friends.

Cyra Dumitru was born in The Hague, Holland and received degrees in English from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1979 and the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1995. Her professional life has included residencies as a Poet-in-the-Schools as well as years of medical writing in Virginia and San Antonio. A passionate swimmer, she currently works as a poet, author of memoir, and meditative essay. She lives near San Antonio.

Her volumes of poetry include What the Body Knows (1999), Listening to Light (2003) and remains (2008). This poem is from Listening to Light: Voice Poems (which I found in the bookstore at Laity Lodge, in the Hill Country of Texas).

Set

She has found him,
I can feel it.
Even in death they love
blazing green that falls

short of my desert.
I have always been the divided one –
buried in dunes
in waves of salt water
one edge never touching the other.

Nephthys pulls away even further,
grows more deeply dark
since I banished Anubis below.
She doesn’t even want the moon.
Isis claims that, so hungry for light.

If only the boy had been my son!
A son to bring my scattered lands
under one rule,
a son to be an orchard
upon my lonely deserts,

an abundance that might
make me feel whole again.

George Bilgere is the author of several books of poetry, including The Going (1994), Haywire (2006), The Good Kiss (2010) and The White Museum (2010). Haywire won the 2006 May Swenson Poetry Award. Bilgere has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, the Society of Midland Authors, the Fulbright Foundation and the Witter Bynner Foundation. He received a Pushcart Prize in 2009, and he currently teaches at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.

This poem is from The White Museum.

Blank

When I came to my mother’s house
the day after she had died
it was already a museum of her
unfinished gestures. The mysteries
from the public library, due
in two weeks. The half-eaten square
of lasagna in the fridge.

The half-burned wreckage
of her last cigarette,
and one red swallow
of wine in a lipsticked
glass beside her chair.

Finally, a blue Bic
on a couple of downs
and acrosses left blank
in the Sunday crossword,
which actually had the audacity
to look a little smug
at having, for once, won.

Robert Lee Brewer is the poetry columnist for Writer’s Digest Magazine. He has just published his first chapbook, Enter. He read his poems at the recent Blue Ridge Writers Conference and was a National Featured Poet at the Austin International Poetry Festival. He lives with his family in suburban Atlanta, Georgia.

Brewer blogs at My Name is Not Bob. This poem is from his chapbook.

Father’s shoes

After midnight. Your legs
and right ankle are sore.
You’ve been running along
the river again. You saw
two new things. First,
a toy soldier. Which reminded
you of your father after
he returned from the casinos
in Atlantic City. Gone
a whole week once. So that
you began to wonder. Then,
there was the time he left
on his 10-speed. Later,
he called on a pay phone
in Indiana. Near a park
wanting picjed up. You
remember your mother packing
you and your brothers
in the car. Pretending
nothing was wrong, not
a damn thing missing,
all the while waiting
for the other shoe to drop.

For National Poetry Month, we’re giving away a copy of Neruda’s Memoirs: Poems by Maureen Doallas. Leave a comment by April 20 and your name is automatically entered for the random drawing.