I cannot tell you the whole story because the whole story will not fit in my mouth. I have always had a small mouth, small tongue, tiny lungs. If I were to try to tell the whole story, I might expire. All over you, and you in your best black robes. It’s like trying to…
And now they range beneath wheatfields in unmanned chambers out of range. They point themselves at celestial targets; today they are rediscovering snow. Perhaps they whispered unto you the sickness that cut a breast from your breast; possible. Love’s surgeon had it in for you, he spread you at the chancel and unmasked. Then hauled…
I have one powerful reflection regarding the issue I edited of Ploughshares. A friend, a former student, a poet, an ally in the battle against the Vietnam War, a wiry little Irishman with a great sense of humor, phoned me about that time and asked if I were busy; he was in town and wanted…
Madeline DeFrees recommends Overtime, poems by Joseph Millar: “Take a sensibility of remarkable delicacy and precision, immerse it in the abrasive, often violent atmosphere of twentieth-century blue-collar America, and what you get is a chronicle of drink, debt, and divorce: a story not unlike that of Raymond Carver. Joseph Millar’s Overtime includes some of the…
Not sibylline but clear, empty weather; of the eight kinds of sky it was the milk-paled potion most like a cup of coffee she poured past full in such a way as to show herself how good she was, how the liquid lolled just over the white cup’s rim, just so the instant before an…
That stuffed pine marten in the hotel corridor Ended up on all fours in nineteen-thirteen And now is making it across No Man’s Land where A patrol of gamekeepers keeps missing him.
Marilyn Hacker recommends Little Ice Age, poems by Maureen Seaton: “There are very few poets of whom I might say, ‘It is inexplicable why this work is not better known, celebrated for all it’s worth.’ Maureen Seaton is a poet like that. Her register is enormous, her verbal daring and wayfaring breathtaking; while the solidity…
from The Jade Buddha: A Sequence In the midst of a life, out by the propane tank, by the stacked timbers, while magpies kept up their quizzical cat-like calls in the piñons— a little threatening, their small part in the large thinking of the planet, their part to be clever and quick, seasonal marauders at…
Once the phone, called the “telephone,” was a voice one heard by pressing what looked like a stethoscope to one’s ear, answering by shouting at a device on the wall. This was before talking on the phone was invented—a more intimate exchange using a receiver that allowed one to speak to the voice while holding…
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