“All of us dazzling in the brilliant slanting light”: Barbara Crooker’s “Strewn”

June 25, 2015June 22, 2015 / Carolyn O / 6 Comments

Not exactly right, but you get the idea.

Last week, my uncle, who lives in Maine, came for a visit, which was excellent in all respects except that it was too short. And it just so happened that last week’s American Life in Poetry column, curated by Ted Kooser (which I highly recommend as a way to get into poetry–the poems are about the experiences of everyday life, and are always accessible) featured a poem by Barbara Crooker about the Maine coast.

“Strewn” is beautifully detailed. I love the list of broken shells that the speaker describes, and the idea of the sunlight on the beach like “a rinse / of lemon on a cold plate.” But it’s the turn at the end of the poem that brings the other people on the beach—and by extension the reader—into the speaker’s orbit that still resonates for me days after reading the poem.

“Then he unlocked the back door / and stepped out into the garden”: Paula Meehan’s “My Father Perceived as a Vision of St Francis”

June 18, 2015June 14, 2015 / Carolyn O / 8 Comments

Photo courtesy Breno Machado via Unsplash

A few weeks ago, I was reading about contemporary Irish poetry (living life in the fast lane, as always), and I learned a little bit about Paula Meehan, named the Ireland Professor of Poetry in 2013. The Irish Times had a feature about her this winter, in which Ciaran Carty wrote,

“It’s more than 40 years, and nine books, since Meehan emerged from childhood in the inner city Dublin tenements to give voice to the disenfranchised everywhere, less in anger than with compassion and an intuitive understanding that, through verse, imbued their lives and memories with mythic dignity.”

Sounds pretty good to me.

Professor Meehan’s poems are a little tricky to find–she doesn’t have an entry at The Poetry Foundation, which is my go-to poetry site, but you can read “Ashes” at Poets.org. The poem that really caught my eye was this one: “My Father Perceived as a Vision of St Francis,” over at The Poetry Project, which is a site devoted to Irish poetry. It’s a lovely poem, anchored in everyday detail, but transcendent all the same.

“a way to attain a life without boundaries”: Juan Felipe Herrera’s “Let Me Tell You What a Poem Brings”

June 11, 2015June 11, 2015 / Carolyn O / 4 Comments

Photo courtesy Modestas Urbonas via Unsplash.

The new Poet Laureate of the United States has just been announced! Juan Felipe Herrera will take up the post in September, the first Chicano poet to do so. He is also the former poet laureate of California. You can read more about him in this Los Angeles Times piece and in this Poetry Foundation profile.

In honor of Mr. Herrera, this week’s poem is “Let Me Tell You What a Poem Brings.” Poetry on poetry can be a bit fussy and pretentious, but here the poem takes readers on a sort of breathless tour, and we end up someplace completely different from where we started, a place where we are “thirsty” but where we are drawn into “alarming waters” that nonetheless invite us to “bathe” and “play.” It’s an inventive, exciting poem that conjures up the best of what poetry can do.

“painted like a fresh prow / stained among the salt weeds”: H.D.’s “Sea Iris”

June 4, 2015May 31, 2015 / Carolyn O / 1 Comment

From our landlady’s collection, which is also pretty great.

One of the many great things about our little corner of neighborhood is the parade of gorgeous, multi-hued irises that line our neighbors’ walkway. The blooms are huge, big enough for me to see the splotches of color from my kitchen window, and they always make me happy. Here’s H.D.‘s imagist poem called “Sea Iris,” which I love.

SEA IRIS

Weed, moss-weed,
root tangled in sand,
sea-iris, brittle flower,
one petal like a shell
is broken,
and you print a shadow
like a thin twig.
Fortunate one,
scented and stinging,
rigid myrrh-bud,
camphor-flower,
sweet and salt—you are wind
in our nostrils.

Do the murex-fishers
drench you as they pass?
Do your roots drag up colour
from the sand?
Have they slipped gold under you—
rivets of gold?
Band of iris-flowers
above the waves,
you are painted blue,
painted like a fresh prow
stained among the salt weeds.

You can read more from H.D.’s collection Sea Garden at Project Gutenberg, here.

Colorado Reading

June 2, 2015June 1, 2015 / Carolyn O / 15 Comments

I don’t know about you, but I find I hardly ever get as much reading done on vacation as I think I will. And that’s okay; usually it means there’s been sightseeing and visiting and talking late at night and eating and museum-going aplenty.

As I mentioned not too long ago, recently we visited family and friends in Denver, which was delightful. I brought along War of the Encyclopaedists, which I started and finished on the trip, as well as Annie Proulx’s Close Range: Wyoming Stories. I figured something with a Western vibe that I could read in short chunks would be a good choice, and it was, if grimmer than expected. Close Range includes Brokeback Mountain, the basis of the movie of the same name, and all things considered it’s one of the brighter stories in the collection. Close Range is visceral reading—Ms. Proulx has an extraordinary gift for rendering place, and her characters are both strange and real.

That’s two books, and extraordinary restraint in book-packing on my part, I must say. There’s a reason for that: I had a list of about a dozen bookstores I wanted to visit in Denver, Colorado Springs, and Boulder, but I only made it to two (guess I’ll just have to go back, darn).

First up was the Tattered Cover, Denver’s largest and most famous independent bookstore. It has several outposts, and I visited the store on Colfax, where I picked up Gregory Pardlo‘s Pulitzer-Prize winning Digest. I read it over the next few days and finished it on the plane, and I highly recommend it. The poems are about origins and identity, fatherhood and what it means to be American. They’re very, very good, and packed with intellectual energy; I want to re-read them all again.

Next I went to one of my uncle’s favorite bookstores, Colorado’s Used Bookstore in Englewood. It’s an unassuming store, with a huge selection of genre paperbacks, an eclectic poetry section, and a huge set of back rooms for nonfiction and trade paperbacks. The woman I met, who I believe owns the store, was very friendly and helpful, and pointed out that they sell books online, including hard-to-find books.

At Colorado’s Used Bookstore I found Ghost Ship by Mary Kinzie and On the Bus with Rosa Parks, by Rita Dove (both poetry), Moral Disorder (a collection of Margaret Atwood stories), Joseph Boyden’s Through Black Spruce (I loved The Orenda and Three-day Road) and Louise Erdrich’s Tracks (still can’t stop thinking about The Round House). I can’t wait to dive into these.

Next time in Colorado, I’ll be trying for those other ten bookstores, and I’d like to look up some Colorado writers before I go, to find their work in its native habitat.

And what about you, Dear Readers? Do you race through books on vacation, or pack more than you can read?

“When lo! a sudden glory!”: Oscar Wilde’s “Vita Nuova”

May 28, 2015May 24, 2015 / Carolyn O / 2 Comments

This weekend I was thrilled to cheer the happy news out of Ireland, and while I was going to write about a different poem this week, I think a little Oscar Wilde is called for here, don’t you?

VITA NUOVA

I stood by the unvintageable sea
Till the wet waves drenched face and hair with spray;
The long red fires of the dying day
Burned in the west; the wind piped drearily;
And to the land the clamorous gulls did flee:
‘Alas!’ I cried, ‘my life is full of pain,
And who can garner fruit or golden grain
From these waste fields which travail ceaselessly!’
My nets gaped wide with many a break and flaw,
Nathless I threw them as my final cast
Into the sea, and waited for the end.
When lo! a sudden glory! and I saw
From the black waters of my tortured past
The argent splendour of white limbs ascend!

(from the 1881 poems)

“only by the wildflower meadow”: David Mason’s “In the Mushroom Summer”

May 21, 2015May 20, 2015 / Carolyn O / 2 Comments

A view from Rocky Mountain National Park

Last week, we visited family and friends in Colorado, which was just delightful (I hope to write a book-themed post about the trip, but you know my track record on posts I plan to write). The scenery is gorgeous, of course, and we were treated to quite an array of weather, starting with heavy snow and including rain, mist, thunderstorms, and brilliant sunshine.

I just came across this little poem by David Mason, called “In the Mushroom Summer,” that gives a good sense of what the mountain landscape looks like in the rain. I love the way the speaker knows how high he’s climbed only by the sight of the flowers in an alpine meadow.

Do tell: Do you have a favorite poem about a place you’ve traveled?

“the whole stunning contraption of girl and rope”: Gregory Pardlo’s “Double Dutch”

May 14, 2015May 8, 2015 / Carolyn O / 2 Comments

This year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry is Gregory Pardlo, who is the author of two books of poetry (Totem and Digest) and the recipient of many awards. In its citation, the Pulitzer committee called the collection “clear-voiced poems that bring readers the news from 21st Century America, rich with thought, ideas and histories public and private.”

Now, as is often the case, I find myself not well enough acquainted with this poet, but I’m going to be on the lookout for his books, especially after reading “Double Dutch,” which is gorgeous, and I’m quite sure the best poem about jump-roping ever written. Like the ropes crossing over each other as the girls turn them, each line of the poem crosses another. What Mr. Pardlo does with light in this poem is stupendous; a painter could make a series out of the images without ever seeing the subjects of the poem in the flesh.

[Note to the Dear Readers: I’m trying an experiment this week wherein the weekly poetry post appears on Thursday and the usual book review/recommendation appears on Tuesday. I’m pretty confident that this will affect absolutely nobody’s life, but if you hate or love the new arrangement, please let me know.]

A Bookish Weekend, with Sonnets

May 5, 2015May 4, 2015 / Carolyn O / 3 Comments

I hope you are enjoying very fine weather, Dear Readers, as we are here in Boston. This past weekend was just gorgeous, and full of bookish delights. First, on Friday night, my friend A. came over and we had this exchange (paraphrased from memory):

Me: I’d like to see that new Thomas Hardy movie that’s coming out.

A: Aren’t there something like three Tom Hardy movies coming out this summer?

Me: ???

A: You know, the actor who was in the Batman movie?

Me: I meant the nineteenth-century novelist.

A: Oh . . .

And then I fell into a paroxysm of laughter as I imagined the kind of world in which three Thomas Hardy movies would come out in one summer. It was amazing. (A has a PhD in English literature, by the way.)

Then there was Independent Bookstore Day, which we celebrated over at Harvard Bookstore:

I was telling my grandpa about the bookstore and he pointed out that when my siblings and I were kids (lo these many years ago), he used to pick out books for us at the very same one (“It’s come full circle” were his words).

I read the Roxane Gay book Saturday night (mini review to come at some point in the next month or so) and flipped through my new poetry books on Sunday, when I also squeezed in a bit of Kate Atkinson’s latest novel, which I’m hoping to finish this week.

As you can see from the picture above, one of the books I picked up at Harvard Bookstore was this vintage (that cover!) Harper Perennial pocket edition of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Collected Sonnets (chosen by the poet herself, apparently). I love the look and the weight of the volume.

Millay was one of the first poets I discovered for myself; on a whim, I picked up a copy of her Selected Poems at Half Price Books when I was in high school, and that book has been with me ever since. She was a brilliant poet (though at times uneven), both earnest and jaunty, heartbroken and carefree. She was straightforward and often very funny, and her biography reads like a novel, which for me made her poems all the more enticing.

There’s plenty to choose from when it comes to her sonnets. The one that begins, “What lips my lips have kissed” is one of the few poems I have memorized that’s always “stuck” (I don’t need to re-memorize it from time to time), and of course it’s very famous. For a bit of a wider range, head over to The Poetry Foundation, which here gives a group of four sonnets from 1922.

“a flower sprang, lilylike, more brilliant / than the purples of Tyre”: Louise Glück’s “Hyacinth”

April 28, 2015April 27, 2015 / Carolyn O / 1 Comment

I wish I’d been able to celebrate National Poetry Month with more fanfare, Dear Readers—next year, I hope, will be different—but I hope you’ve had the chance to read a poem or two more than usual. In fact, I’d love to hear about what you’ve been reading, so please let me know in the comments which poems you’ve liked recently (slow to respond though I am, always begging your pardon).

This past weekend friends visited us for dinner and conversation, and brought with them beautiful stems of hyacinth from their garden. The whole apartment smells like spring. It happens to be one of my very favorite flowers, so here is a poem by one of my very favorite poets, Louise Glück, to go with it, though I think you’ll see that her poem is much more somber than the flower.

Rosemary and Reading Glasses

Reads Worth Remembering

Poetry