In Night of the Republic: Poems, poet Alan Shapiro loads his minds-eye camera with film (or, these days, a disk) and takes a series of detailed, rather stark photographs. His subjects are the common, everyday things we notice only when we need them but generally ignore: a car dealership, a gas station restroom, a park bench, a dry cleaner, a swimming pool, a museum, a doorbell, a funeral home.

Shapiro’s poetic photographs are sharp and clear; we’re not left guessing the subject. But they often lead in an unexpected direction, as common, everyday things can do. Consider “Barbershop,” which becomes a meditation on eternity:

Eternity is the spiral up the poles
spiraling to its endless end.
Time is the vitrine
of antiquated gels,
conditioners, restoratives,
stray sections from yesterday’s Today
all over the table
in the waiting area where
Eternity is waiting…

These are poems to be read two and three times, and then two or three times more, like photographs that need to be reexamined to see how new angles or shades or colors can change the created whole. In “Stone Church,” for example, the emphasis on the stone construction gives way to what happens inside:

…At night, high
over the tiny
galaxy of candles
guttering down
in dark chapels
all along the nave,
there’s greater
gravity inside
the grace that’s risen
highest into rib
vaults and flying
buttresses, where
each stone is another
stone’s resistance to
the heaven far
beneath it…

These photograph-like poems, or poetic photographs, are filled with quiet wonder. And like fine photographs, their meanings can keep changing. Night of the Republic is a stellar collection of poetry.

Shapiro, who has won several poetry awards, is a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is also publishing his first novel, Broadway Baby, in January.

Some of the most powerful stories in the Bible are about women – Eve, Sarah, Deborah, Ruth, Esther, Mary, Mary Magdalene, the woman at the well, and the woman who touched Jesus’s clothes, to mention a few of the more obvious ones. Their stories are stories of sin, disbelief, leadership, faithfulness, courage, faith and steadfastness. These stories speak to both men and women, and most likely because they are most of all human stories, things we recognize and understand.

In poetry, these stories can become our stories. That’s what poet Tania Runyan accomplishes in A Thousand Vessels: Poems – to write both poems about Biblical characters and non-Biblical characters and situations, to help see the connections to the stories in the Bible and how they apply to us. From “Beach Walk:”

I wore my leopard bikini like the mannequin
at Bullock’s: shoulders back, breasts out,
fingertips light on my hips. Dina swiveled
her buttocks in a fuchsia French-cut
that pointed like an arrow between her thighs…

Poems about Dinah (the sister of the 12 sons of Jacob) and her rape are paired with a poem about child sex offenders. Poems about the woman at the well in the gospel of St. John are paired with a poem about the sins committed by a child against another child. Poems about Esther are grouped with a poem about walking on a beach. The stories of Jairus’s daughter are matched to a poem about children who nearly die. In “Children of Near-Death,” Runyan describes the near death of a 10-year-old named Edward:

…I dove. No more stuttering in Class. No more stinky
dodgeball courts, the cool kids lobbing
at my face. I swam deeper

a million pounds of water behind me. Kelp waved at me
like a crowd gathered in the grandstand.
Wrapped around my arms and legs

till I couldn’t get loose. Darkness…

These are not all dark poems. To the contrary, these are hopeful poems, not the least for the biblical characters represented and described. But what the addition of the non-Biblical poems does is to make the Biblical characters recognizable and contemporary – the woman who makes a terrible mistake, the woman who scoffs, the woman who assumes a leadership role, the woman who is faithful and caring even when no one expected her to be.

In that sense, A Thousand Vessels becomes a contemporary application of the Biblical stories. It’s a wonderful collection, full of faith, hope and truth.

Quick: name a contemporary love poem.

Hard, right? In contemporary poetry, one doesn’t find much about love – the emotion, the feeling, the condition that is so characteristics of a considerable body of poetry from earliest times to the 20th century. Think Song of Solomon, the Greeks and Romans. Think of Boccaccio, the Elizabethans (those sonnets!) and the Cavalier poets, the Romantics and even the Victorians.

But something happened in the century just past. Perhaps two world wars, a major depression, the rise of the media and the dominance of Freudian psychology pushed love poetry into a forgotten corner. I’ve even heard that feminism made love poetry a dangerous occupation. Whatever the cause or causes, love poetry isn’t what it has been in times before ours.

Which makes Dave Malone’s book of poetry Under the Sycamore all the more remarkable. Malone, the author of several books of poetry and a university professor, first published the book in 2003. It is a volume of 100 poems, all untitled and all short (the longest is eight lines). And they are all poems about love – love yearned for, love found, love lost, love regained – almost a story of a relationship that happens over an entire lifetime.

He begins:

Looking at the stars,
I have one thought
where I’m holding you
until they disappear.

And then this:

The moonlight on your face
through the open window
is actually my breath.

These short poems are filled with longing and passion, the self- and shared knowledge of two lovers, along with emptiness, loss and then reconciliation.

I lost my way in the snow
until I heard your voice
in the swirling wind.

To read these poems (and to read them aloud) is to sit in a well-lit, under-furnished room, watching the object of your love, who is unaware of being observed. Under the Sycamore is a beautiful volume of love poems. We need more of them.

It was another TweetSpeak poetry jam, and this one started with a few rumors. All of the prompts were taken from Rumors of Water by L.L. Barkat. And it’s rumored that quite a number of poems emerged during the jam. We’ll have to wait and see what develops. You can’t be too careful about rumors.

Here are first seven poems from the jam.

Rumors of a Blue Geography

By @llbarkat, @Doallas, @kellysauer, @pathoftreasure, @amberleepb, @RachelleEaton, @divyaasachdeva and @shewhodid. Retweets by @wichmans, @cathiejoy, @shellartistree, @KChavda, @Skookum86, @kruss984, @LaundryLineDiv, @EscapeIntoLife, @umeshnrao, and @CarlyRocks. Edited by @gyoung9751.

Rumors of girls in white dresses

I’ve heard there are rumors
of girls in white dresses
and a woman behind a lens
and a boat with no dress.
Float at your own pace,
fingers dangling,
catching the current.
If I tread the water,
will it weep?
And what of the woman
and the white dress asleep?
How will I write
the white dresses
and the boat
and the fingers.
Oh, I want to write
the fingers…
White moon in a white dress
and me wishing for the next dance.
Can a dress dance
alone?
And a dress:
can it have wings?

How will I write?

How will I write
how the color of your eyes
falls at dusk,
lighting my way?
If life has no symmetry
but the water has waves
the color of your eyes,
perhaps that is symmetry
enough?

She follows the moon

She follows the moon
and dances with the stars;
her fingers disrupt,
catch a wrong chord,
cause disharmony.

She says:
Catch me without disharmony
catch me at the chord
to the left of the little hollow
at the base of my neck.
Catch me alone
or with a purple moth.
I really don’t care
how you catch me
with or without cause
with or without story.

She says:
There will be a purple moth
in every chapter
wings bent as a page
where the story waits to be
picked up again.
At the base of my neck
you’ll find the point
where our story
once began.

The fingers are playing

The fingers are playing
with keys and with strings
and silk faerie strands,
the touch light,
as the moth’s wings
the shivery slide of a nail
against skin
leaving me
rumors of water,
or the touch
that echoes the wing
the memory of lightness
Nails, skin
again storying my dress
and its whiteness.

Pan does laundry, too

Pan could play a laundry cup;
he still knows how to play.
The flute is in the movement;
I will follow Pan,
play his notes again
to echo your message written
inside this laundry-soap cap
you twist and turn with no effort
Shivery slide,
caps glide,
a twist, a turn
you’ll learn my message:
that Pan might make music
to woo us
into the lightness of a bubble
ascending.
The cap flies, spilling words
on the white-winged dress.
In the bubbles
we could rise and
see the world
through rainbow eyes.
A stroke it will be
dear lady
to make laundry of our love;
Just don’t leave me
rumors of laundry.

Spilling words

Spilling words
spilling wings
all this spilling
and I am ascending.
Pool the letters into hands;
pour them into words;
drink them down.
Pool the letters
into my mouth
and my lips will
spill them sweet
to you again

Laundry love

Love is tangled shirts
the hem of a skirt
caught in the brass button
of your jeans.
We hang it out
to dry,
a line of words
glimmering
like those rumors
rising among night whispers.

Ascend to the moon, dear love,
ascend to the moon;
follow the eyes
leading the way.
Let them fly
snapping in the wind.
Laundry love on a line
Ascend to the moon
on a brass button;
ascend the hem
on a line of thread.

Stanley Moss is a poet, a publisher of poetry, and a private art dealer, specializing in Spanish and Italian Old Masters. His first book of poetry was published almost 50 years ago; at Sheep Meadow Press, he’s published such authors as John Ashberry, Stanley Kunitz and Frederico Garcia Lorca (posthumously).

Now Moss has published what must stand as a testament to his career as a poet, God Breaketh Not All Men’s Hearts Alike: New & Later Collected Poems. The poems are dazzling in their breadth, from mythology to art, and from love to religion. There are extended farewells to friends who’ve died; there are poems that celebrate and remember.

Many of the poems are about time and aging. Moss feels time pressing upon him, and he presses back. From “Glutton:”

If I could gorge on time, twirl hours on my fork
and wipe my plate clean with my daily bread,
but I am Time’s pretzel, his pistachio nut.
I wish I were time’s spaghetti carbonara.
I am what he munches, kept on the bar
Long enough for the waitress to take the order,
for Time to be seated, whoever he is –
this Godlike No God who little by little
devours me. Eat , eat my Lord,
you will not swallow me in one gulp…

He keenly feels the loss of friends to death, perhaps a reminder of his own mortality. There were several poems about or dedicated to poet and writer Stanley Kunitz, such as “Autumn:”

In a dream after he died
I received picture postcards
from him every day for two weeks
in a single night – the picture:
blazing maples and walnut trees,
New England in full foliage.
I wept that he should write
To me and my wife in a handwriting not his
in blue ink so often.
Since I do not remember the text,
I suppose the message was:
“Every autumn you know where to find me.”

He remembers swimming across the Hudson River when he was seven; in one excellent poem he compares Walt Whitman to the falling of the World Trade Center towers; he ponders the Holocaust; and he writes a six-poem commentary on Antony and Cleopatra called “Along the Tiber.”

He understands the basic of many religions while he seems to wrestle, like Jacob, with the God of his Jewish faith. And this wrestling becomes more important with age. In fact, many of the poems in this volume are about God, and understanding God.

God Breaketh Not All Men’s Hearts Alike is an extraordinary collection of a man’s life.

I hadn’t read Rodney Jones’s previous books of poetry (this one is his ninth), but I will now that I’ve read Imaginary Logic: Poems. It a collection full of the familiar and the everyday but described in unexpected and precise ways, and with an eye that is focused and accurate.

The poems cover a wide terrain – recollections of youth and childhood, prayers, family relationships, the stories houses tell, and, among others, driving at night through St. Louis (Jones is a professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, about 90 minutes southeast of St. Louis). The poems vary in length from a few stanzas to several pages, but they are all written in distinctly readable and approachable language; this is not so much the poetry of academia as it is the poetry of recognizable life.

One of his longer poems in the collection, “The Previous Tenants,” is about the couple who lived in the house previously to the teller of the story:

The couple who built our house had great plans
for this lot where they would live out their days:
he in dedicated husbandry, priming a garden
with sludge from the sewage plant, hauling stones
from the condemned homesteads by the new lake
to buttress the terraces; and she reading Aquinas
or pouring Pinot Noir for predinner conversations
after her work as a counselor at the women’s center…

But plans don’t work out; he gets Alzheimer’s or something like it while she becomes enraged at what he’s turning into. Jones turns the story into a poetic meditation on death, relationships, and what we leave behind us.

We know them from the colors they left more than their words.
We know them more from the marks they left on the wood
than the pulses that quickened when they entered rooms.
We know the four flower beds. We do not know their love…

These poems are quiet works, reflective, provoking the reader’s own memories of growing up and growing old. It’s a fine collection.

From bees, our recent poetry jam on Twitter began to transition to swans (that’s how these things can go). Here are next five poems. All of the prompts were taken from Anne Overstreet’s Delicate Machinery Suspended: Poems.

Stories of the Bees 2

By @mmerubies, @llbarkat, @AnneDOvers, @Jeff_Overstreet, @Doallas, @SandraheskaKing, @lindachontos, @gyoung9751, @poetryinabottle, @rosanneosborne, @togetherforgood, @LoveLifeLitGod, @strangejkp, @quietlybananas, @mrsmetaphor and @dthaase. Edited by @gyoung9751.

Swans

The swans, serene, glide across the water, glass.
The swans, their necks of silk fingered softly,
shimmer their wings frosted by spun sunlight;
drift, leaving a trail of memories;
hiss thundering their wings like horses.

Swans in love

The slick of her neck in the bee-fingered sun
sang of summer, summer sweet as honey,
summer soft as a swan’s neck.
Her hand touched his cygnet ring.

The swan girl picked bees from the air,
rescued the ale boy from a sure gold drowning.
The seventh swan-boy, she loved him best.
Spin me a honey tree; kiss my signet ring,

Ring around a tree, golden dance of honeyed autumn;
ring around a stone thrown in.
The swan grays; the temper of that muscle
in the neck the back a ridge of brokenness.

The leaves turn into the gold of honey;
the afternoons cool with the flutter
of swans’ wings. We are past the season
of milk and honey: the swans sleep.

Forgotten are the swans of summer,
the bees floating through the heat.

A story told

A story told in a tracing of palm against palm,
she combed the nettles from her silken hair;
he combed the honey from the hive, he said
wipe the sting of nettles from my hand.

Wipe the memories too and the shadows
and the sour trace of raveled silk. I try to leave
the rind of summer fermenting into harder months
and dreams that begin on soon-dark afternoons.

Let me trace your palm in silver sunlight,
in golden moonlight; let me trace the lines
that lead to hope and leave behind
the memories trailing paths of grief.

The black cat

There is a black cat at my door,
jingling his collar, telling me
summer is gone, and he’d like
to come inside. The black cat
is not the only thing that tells
of winter’s coming.

And the black swan sang and
the black cat wound her tail
around the silver birch.
The cat is made of black silk,
cut from one special bolt
of cloth, lightening bolt, snap!

Snap! went the birch and
the lines and Snap! went
the taut silk. Winter comes
but first, autumn spills
honeyed sunlight upon
the trees, upon the ground.

Eat my rind

Eat my rinds, too,
there is still some
sweetness left in me.
Even the core has
value. Taste it, spit it
out if you must.

For our Poetry jam on Twitter in September, poet Anne Overstreet, author of the recently published Delicate Machinery Suspended: Poems, joined us. The prompts all came from her collection. And we got into bees and moons and ants and rosaries and all manner of things. (It was great fun.) The first five poems are below.

Stories of the Bees

By @mmerubies, @llbarkat, @AnneDOvers, @Jeff_Overstreet, @Doallas, @SandraheskaKing, @lindachontos, @gyoung9751, @poetryinabottle, @rosanneosborne, @togetherforgood, @LoveLifeLitGod, @strangejkp, @quietlybananas, @mrsmetaphor and @dthaase. Edited by @gyoung9751.

Honey-braided shadows

The sun braided shadows in my hair;
the shadows braided memories,
memories of slivered light and
honey-baked hair, honey-combed
highlights in my hair, baking
shadows into nets, catching my heart.

The bumbles braid a choir with honey bees.
It is a silly thing, my fear of bees. So small,
couldn’t really hurt me, right? But the bright
yellow buzz scares. They enter, they leave;
I can never keep track of their unlined path,
this unlined path stretching before my feet.

I’m eager yet afraid to follow the hum
of the bees to the braided sunlight.
The bees rise to braided rows of roses
that for the shivering had not even opened
their eyes. The path I left behind me is lined
with broken pieces, where I jumped too soon.

Bees and yellow jackets

Yellow jackets like nets cast
marked each step. The vibration
of the hive enfolded his hand;
the energy, transferred, traced
red lines in his palm, enfolding
his face, hive-warm, light-combed.
The vibration of the bees enfolded
his heart, the lines in his hands
between heaven and hive.
The lines of bees enter the heart
of the flowers, carrying away
the sweetness. These days are
my hive. This man, with his tongue
heavy with honey, wipes a drop
at the corner of his mouth.
He can never love another.
She will smell my scent on his skin,
where the honey-love stained his flesh.

The song of the bees

The song taken up,
his heart fills, keeping
to the beat of wings,
sending messages
of hope they speak
with dance of wings.
The struck strings
of bee hum the path
of nectar to my mouth.
Honey, I strum.

The Queen arrives

The Queen arrives, her throne embellished
with sticky sweetness of love. In the winter
the Queen sleeps; in Spring she wakes
to blossoms, and swans. The workers rush
to serve; she answers with beating wing.
The hive’s a frenzy in the seasons of blossoms,
the Queen’s guard on watch.
If this is my hive am I the Queen Bee or
just a drone mindlessly working?
I choose to be Queen Bee. I will woo
the worker and feed him my honey soft words.
My love will cling to him like syrup.

Is it so bad to be the mindless drone
gathering nectar from flowers braided
with spun sunlight?

Tiny weavers

Tiny weavers of petaled cloth,
The bees’ rhythms are heard only
by petaled ears. My mind touches
the memory of bees at work.
Mindlessly I trace my memories,
shadows silking an amber past.

Born in Croatia and raised in Slovenia, Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun has published 30 collections of poetry in his native language. His poetry has been translated into more than 20 languages, and he’s had nine collection published in English. The Blue Tower: Poems is the tenth in English, and translated with the author by Michael Biggins of the University of Washington; it was first published in Slovenian in 2007.

To read the poems of The Blue Tower is to become disoriented and dislocated, and that is perhaps the point. Here’s a representative example, from the first poem in the collection, “The Bride Wins Both Times:”

To provoke the pasture’s ladder, to wash out the cat’s message,
What you hear through walls is panic coming here.
In Morocco he whipped slaves. First I open the chest.
The ribs turn gray. I saw nomads, women on horseback. The dog days will
     come dressed in a
T-shirt. I’ll show you hand, my hand is your hand…

This is language being used in an unconventional way, simultaneously drawing attention to itself and pushing the reader to the next phrase the next line, seeking the connections or the context and finally realizing there may not be any (in this poem, in a kind of refutation of the title, there isn’t even a mention of a bride).

Another example of this dislocating action is from the poem “Persia.” But here, the word and idea of “jump” helps to knit the poem together, as does a bit a repetition:

When I jumped on the sieve, the sieve
got sick. The word departed from the flesh and
became the fruit of Nicodemus. No one is free
of gentle bonds, buttons and ribbons
excepted. We dug them in pearlike flutters.
From there a short jump to a branch. Johnny Weissmuller,
Such a well-stitched tarp, where do you see these now? We turned
Gristle into myriads. Into mush. Into pharaohs…

This is not stream of consciousness poetry. Each sentence, each phrase is usually so well contained and tightly written that this isn’t a flow of language but indeed a very careful, heavily crafted use of it.

The effect, interestingly enough, is to push the focus of the poems to the reader, trying to make sense of the phrases and sentences and finally evaluating each phrase and sentence on its own merit and personal meaning.

The Blue Tower is full of arresting ideas and language, but a slow and careful reading is a necessity to grasp them.

From the time I was 8 until I was 14, I spent a week each summer at my grandmother’s house in Shreveport. I would sleep in the second bedroom, which was always called “the back room” even though it and my grandmother’s bedroom formed the back of the house. It was the room with a ceiling door in the closet that led to the attic; it was the room where my grandmother stored a lot of things, including my grandfather’s cane; it was the room and the bed where my grandfather died. That I slept in that bed and in that room never bothered me; instead, I felt closer to him, this man who died when I was nine months old but had shaped so many in the family, including my father.

I was continually reminded of this “back room” while reading former U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall’s The Back Chamber: Poems, a collection filled with memory, desire, imaginings and longings, the collection Hall needed to write as he enters his ninth decade. The title poem captures the essence of the collection:

Here is the houses’ genius: pram and bedstead,
Heart-shaped valentine candy
Boxes, oil lamps, a captain’s chair,
And Ben Keneston’s underwear,
A century ago
Folded away in case it came in handy,
By prudent family dead.

Here chests keep layers of relics: a beaded purse.
A graduation dress
That Ben’s wife Lucy made in homespun,
Reports from school in nineteen-one,
A century ago,
And painted China heads, now bodiless,
From dolls of three dead daughters.

Here, in a few short lines, is memory, family history, relics from that history. Old report cards – the small things of living and the small things of a life that become more important as the end of life becomes closer, not the big, major events of life but the common, everyday things that happen, almost as a matter of course, what Hall refers to in “The Things” as “the masters of the trivial.”

A highlight of the poems is “Ric’s Progress,” which in 21 sections tells the story of Ric, his first and second marriages, how his life changed with the loss of a job, where he ends up at age 60. It’s not exactly a happy ending. As Hall says, “…if stories are happy, they haven’t ended.” The poem series ends with Ric and his second wife Molly contemplating their sagging and wrinkled skin.

These are poems about memories, both real and imagined: old loves, teenage years, the inevitable aging process. Hall’s first wife, poet Jane Kenyon who died at 48, is cited frequently, her shadow looming large in the poet’s mind, as she’s described in the extended poem “Meatloaf:”

…Jane Kenyon, who loved baseball, enjoyed
the game on TV but fell asleep
by the fifth inning, She died twelve years
ago, and thus would be sixty now,
watching baseball as her hair turned right.
I see her tending her hollyhocks,
gazing west at Eagle Pond, walking
to the porch favoring her right knee.
I live alone with baseball each night
but without poems…

It is memory real and memories imagined, the relationships the poet has and with people alive and dead, that so mark this strong collection. These are poems of a life lived long.

The Back Chamber will be published Sept. 13.