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

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