Every Sunday, I spend my afternoon with a book of poetry. I have 3 bookshelves reserved just for poetry books at my house (I’m running out of room. I never can get ahead,in shelf-space) so usually, its easy to find a book I want to read, though in the process I start several books before I find something I like. I recently reorganized my shelves, and in so doing, rediscovered some of my favorites:
Claudia Emerson, Late Wife
In poems that balance a lyrical and narrative style, Claudia Emerson writes of her broken marriage with a tenderness void of bitterness. Her characters–her ex-husband, herself, her mother, her new husband–are both deeply personal and also universal in their experience. She does not stand on a soapbox and admonish the failings of her marriage (read: ex-husband). Rather we are shown the way in which relationships crumble–like a game of horseshoes running so late in the night,you are just throwing aimlessly, like a once-loved house gone fallow, like living in a borrowed house.
My Grandmother’s Plot in the Family Cemetery
She was my grandfather’s second wife. Coming late
to him, she was the same age his first wife
had been when he married her. He made
my grandmother a young widow to no one’s surprise,
and she buried him close beside the one whose sons
clung to her at the funeral tighter than her own
children. But little of that story is told
buy this place. The two of them lie beneath one stone,
Mother and Father in cursive carved at the foot
of the grave. My grandmother, as though by her own design
removed, is buried in the corner, outermost plot,
with no one near, her married name the only sign
she belongs. And at that, she could be Daughter or pitied
Sister, one of those who never married.
T. Crunk, New Covenant Bound
T. Crunk lives in Alabama, and his poems follow the tradition of Southern poetry–heavily narrative and lyrical, in the tradition of Ellen Bryant Voigt or Wendell Berry. T. Crunk unloads powerful images in short spaces. His poems have the feel of the past come alive; the present and the future and the past overlap on the page, and we are transported to a time without time. We live alongside our own ghosts.
Nightfall
Blue clouds
smother a pale ghostmoon
above the cluster of roofs
like hulls of capsized boats.
Peach trees in the yard
go on with their dumb show
locusts’ tiny engines
whirring, may-moths
tittling the window screen
of my father’s kitchen.
Lamp on the table
remains unlit
letting darkness take it — day gone
beyond all ease.
In the next room
my grandmother,
watching night take the houses
and the street
watching it take her hand
resting on the sill,
is five years old
sitting on her iron bedstead
at the window
looking downriver.
For her
the streetlamp at the corner
flickering on
is the spotlight
of a freight packet
rounding Haddock’s Elbow
searching of the Birmingham landing…
A thousand miles away
a thousand miles from home
I’m watching
the same white moon
come clear
weary rounder
casting its blind eye
over the tar-shingled sheds
along the alley
the blue shirts hanging on a line
and in through the open
window where I sit
wondering how
it could all come down
to this — a handful
of change on the dresser
a pocketknife
my empty coat exhausted on a chair
my father’s face in the mirror
the light around him now
all falling
and fallen.
Beth Ann Fennelly, Unmentionables
I was introduced to Beth Ann Fennelly’s poetry several years ago when she came and read at Belhaven University. Her poems were saucy and daring. She wore red lipstick. She wrote about being a woman without falling into sentimentalism or cliche. That’s not to say that is all she wrote about, but I was impressed by the originality of her voice–it was so unpoetic, in a classical sense. I find myself returning to her books often, but especially Unmentionables.
from The Kudzo Chronicles
I.
Kudzo sallies into the gully
like a man pulling up a chair
where a woman was happily dining alone.
Kudzo sees a field of cotton,
wants to be its better half.
Pities the red clay, leaps across
the color wheel to tourniquet.
Sees every glass half full,
pours itself in. Then over the brim,
Scribbles in every margin
with its green highlighter. Is begging
to be measured. Is pleased
to make acquaintance with
your garden, which it is pleased to name
Place Where I Am Not
Yet. Breads its own welcome mat.
Adie’s Greatest Poetry Hits ep. 2
While working as a graduate intern at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History last year, I began a particular assignment centered on Eudora Welty. The goal of my project was to find a way to mesh social media with Miss Welty’s connection to MDAH, possibly through the use of Twitter or Facebook. The catch? I knew very little about Eudora Welty’s life.
