I’m not really sure how to tell you how enjoyable Mary Oliver’s new collection of poetry, A Thousand Mornings is. The poems she doles out are delicate and easy to read, but they linger with you, long after you’ve turned the page.

I read an interview with Mary Oliver in which she shared her writing process. She hides pencils and small scraps of paper along the trail she walks every morning, just in case she forgot her notebook, and needs to write something down. “Most mornings I’m up to see the sun, and that rising of the light moves me very much, and I’m used to thinking and feeling in words, so it sort of just happens,” she said in an interview this morning with NPR.

Mary Oliver has become well known for the natural world she recreates so well on the page (she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984). She makes it look easy. In A Thousand Mornings, Mary Oliver does the same, but her poems are a little more diverse then her last several volumes. Bob Dylan makes a cameo appearance (what could be better?), as does the poet William Blake.

I Go Down to the Shore

I go down to the shore in the morning

and depending on the hour the waves

are rolling in or moving out,

and I say, oh, I am miserable,

what shall–

what should I do? And the sea says

in its lovely voice:

Excuse me, I have work to do.

Charles Simic, The World Doesn’t End

Reading Chales Simic’s surrealist poems is like diving into a Dali painting. The clocks are dripping, the landscape is both familiar and unfamiliar, the juxtaposition of images doesn’t seem to make any sense, but the longer you spend in the poem, the more everything seems to fit together (in much the same way a dream makes sense). His poems are darkly original portraits of life.

        I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole

me right back. Then the gypsies stole me again.

This went on for some time. One minute I was

in the caravan suckling the dark teat of my new

mother, the next I sat at the long dining room table

eating my breakfast with a silver spoon.

It was the first day of spring. One of my

fathers was sining in the bathtub; the other one

was painting a live sparrow the colors of a tropical

bird.

 

Robert Hass, Time and Materials

Robert Hass’s poetry is timeless. He transcends time and place, and writes about something that is universal, but also deeply familiar.  His poems vary in length and structure, but his style is reminescent of Zen and ancient Chinese poetry–there is a reverence and wisdom in his lines. He does has a sense of humor in his writing (one of his poems is titled: “Poem with a cucumber in it” and includes the line: “If you think I am going to make/A sexual joke in this poem, you are mistaken”) but Hass does not settle with getting you to chuckle. His poems always twist towards an image that is both strangely humorous and haunting.

The opening poem in Time and Materials is short, but the imagery is so powerful, the poem seems much bigger. (Think of “Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams)

Iowa, January

In the long winter nights, a farmer’s dreams are narrow.

Over and over, he enters the furrow.

Donald Hall, White Apples and the Taste of Stone

Donald Hall is the quintescential American poet (think Robert Frost and Billy Collins). His poetry is heavily narrative, and captures the voice of mid-centry America as it comes of age into the 21st century. He writes with translucency and poignancy of the banality of death and loss (his collection, The Marriage Bed examines his life following his wife’s death) without falling into sentimentalism. Several of his poems are so intimate, that it feels as if you are reading his personal letters in verse.

White Apples

when my father had been dead a week

I woke

with his voice in my ear

I sat up in bed

and held my breath

and stared at the pale closed door

white apples and the taste of stone

if he called again

I would put on my coat and galoshes

Adie’s Greatest Hits of Poetry, ep. 1

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

She’s the first southern poet laureate since the original laureate, Robert Penn Warren, and she’s also the poet laureate of Mississippi. Our state has no shortage of literary talent, and I am especially excited to claim Natasha Trethewey as a native daughter.

Her poetry masterfully confronts her personal history surrounding race, while also giving a voice to the historically voiceless members of a racially charged south. Domestic workers tell their story in her first volume of poetry, Domestic Work. The imagined story of Ophelia, a mixed-race prostitute and subject of photographer E. J. Bellocq in early 20th century New Orleans, beautifully unfolds in Bellocq’s Ophelia:

Bellocq

-April 1911

There comes a quiet man now to my room-

Papa Bellocq, his camera on his back.

He wants nothing, he says, but to take me

as I would arrange myself, fully clothed-

a brooch at my throat, my white hat angled

just so- or not, the smooth map of my flesh

awash in afternoon light. In my room

everything’s a prop for his composition-

brass spittoon in the corner, the silver

mirror, brush and comb of my toilette.

I try to pose as I think he would like-shy

at first, then bolder. I’m not so foolish

that I don’t know this photograph we make

will bear the stamp of his name, not mine.

Her Pulitzer-prize-winning Native Guard focuses on the stories of the Louisiana Native Guard, a black regiment in the Union Army (mostly former slaves) that guarded Confederate prisoners of war.

Last but not least, Trethewey’s memoir Beyond Katrina describes the heart wrenching after-effects of Katrina on her family and the community she grew up in on the Mississippi coast.

Check out these two great articles about Trethewey’s appointment as poet laureate:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/07/books/natasha-trethewey-is-named-poet-laureate.html?_r=1

http://www.npr.org/2012/06/10/154584917/two-poems-from-the-nations-new-top-poet

by Anna

Around 30 years ago I met Jim Harrison and had supper with Jim and his publisher, a great Lemuria pal, Sam Lawrence. It was a small gathering of Jim’s followers, mostly booksellers. That evening was an exciting night for me and the beginning of my friendship with Jim and Sam.

Becoming a fan of Jim’s work was already well established, but from that night the joy of feeling like one of Jim’s tribe grew. Today, since first reading Jim’s work 35 years ago, I consider the meaning of Jim’s words to have had a profound influence on me.

Again, as my last two blogs, I am still celebrating  poetry month. I’m writing about Jim’s new book of poems, published in the Fall of 2011, Songs of Unreason. I read Songs, two pages a day, sometimes rereading. However when I finished, I started Songs over and reread the same way. I spend about six months enjoying these poems. My reading time was so marvelous that I could have read a third or fourth time.

Here are a few passages from these songs that I hope radiate the power of Jim’s voice.

from “Notation”

Nearly everything we are taught is false

except how to read. All these poems that drift

upward in our free-floating minds hang there

like stationary birds with a few astonishing

girls and women. (5)

from “Skull”

The only answer I’ve found is the moving

water whose music is without a single lyric. (25)

from “River III”

You have to hold your old

heart lightly as the female river holds

the clouds and trees, its fish

and the moon, so lightly but firmly

enough so that nothing gets away. (71)

from “Suite of Unreason”

What vices we can hold in our Big Heads

and Big Minds, our Humor and Humility.

We don’t march toward death, it marches toward us

as a summer thunderstorm came slowly across

the lake long ago. See the lightning of mortality dance,

the black clouds whirling as if a million crows. (130)

from “Moping”

. . . Memories follow us

like earaches in childhood . . . (131)

from “Death Again”

 . . . Of course it’s a little hard

to accept your last kiss, your last drink,

your last meal . . .

We’ll know as children again all that we are

destined to know, that the water is cold

and deep, and the sun penetrates only so far. (141)

I want to thank Jim for his friendship to Lemuria and me and for all the gifts his words have given to all the Lemurians that are part of his tribe.

“The Blue Shawl”

The other day at the green dumpsters,

an old woman in a blue shawl

told me that she loved my work. (65)

A few years ago, I had a wonderful and very well meaning Harper sales rep named Kate. She was a Yankee from Wisconsin, or somewhere up there, and we had quite different personalities. Lemuria was the bottom of the pile of bookstores she called on, being her southern most store. This Yankee gal came to deep Dixie to sell books.

Kate loves books and is one of the very best book reps I’ve ever had call on me. For you independent bookstore fans, having a great publisher rep who cares about books, her company and her bookstores makes such a difference. This work, when good, adds to the diversity and quality of the bookstore, and especially to the chosen volumes for sale on the bookstore shelves which reflect the store’s soul.

Kate grew fond of the Blues and Lemuria and she even put up with my orneriness. We also respected each others work and desires to get the right books to the right readers. We grew fond of each other and our work together was good for our readers, our bookstore and her publisher.

As our real book related friendship grew from working together, we began to genuinely share books with each other.

My blog’s purpose is to share with you a special writer, a Kate favorite she shared with me, Jane Hirshfield. To continue celebrating poetry month even after it’s officially passed, I share my favorite touches of Jane’s grace from Come, Thief, her new book of poems.

I thought long and hard about these first lines from “Decision”:

There is a moment before a shape

hardens, a color sets.

Before the fixative or heat of kiln.

The letter might still be taken

from the mailbox. (5)

How interesting it is to write a long sincere letter and then never mail the words. Words written and never shared. Later, when reading what emptiness the writer can feel. What changes in life, if mailed, would have occurred?

From “Vinegar and Oil” (6):

From “Big-Leaf Maple Standing over Its Own Reflection”:

A boat’s hull does not travel last year’s waves.

And later from the same poem:

Lightning, like luck, lands somewhere (8)

From “Tolstoy and the Spider” (33):

From “Sheep”:

and your heart is startled

as if by the shadow

of someone once loved.

Neither comforted by this

nor made lonely.

Only remembering

that a self in exile is still a self

as a bell unstruck for years

is still a bell. (45)

This wonderful business of real book selling is about sharing. In closing, I’m happy to share with you what my real book friend shared with me, my favorite poem by Jane Hirshfield.

From “Fifteen Pebbles”:

Transparent as glass,

the face of the child telling her story.

But how else learn the real,

if not by inventing what might lie outside it. (62)

Epilogue for my real bookselling companions–Also from “Fifteen Pebbles”:

Like moonlight seen in a well,

The one who sees it

blocks it. (60)

Waking: Poems by Ron Rash

(Hub City Press, 2011)

April is the national poetry month, and since Lemuria does not have a seasoned poetry reader/bookseller, I decided to write about two of Ron’s four poetry books.

Waking is Ron’s first book poetry in nearly a decade. I read Waking soon after it appeared this fall. It was the first of Ron’s poetry books that I had read and I enjoyed it. Ron’s rural details capture southern man’s enchantment with nature, lightening, weather, and so on. These elements are easy to relate to and they speak to the southern myth.

On water from “Watauga County: 1959”

as I hear silence widen

like fish swirls on a calm pond

On reflection from “Mirror”

come clear in first light and find

only herself, which is all

she wishes for this moment

On love from “Rebecca Boone”

the bed

where need and memory merged

On the known and unknown from “Rebecca Boone”

then lifted the newborn, smiled

at a face more his own than

even he could understand.

On contemplation from “Waterdogs”

passing clouds

read like pages turned in a book

After Waking I immediately picked up Eureka Mill (Hub City, 1998), a book of poems which captures life in the mill town of Eureka. With emphatic vision, Rash captures the trials of Appalachia. Though I appreciate the Eureka Mill concept through poetry, for me personally I did not find as many signals of the truth in this collection.

Please join us for one of Lemuria’s favorite writers. Ron takes the banner of southern literature forward with his new novel The Cove. But I sure hope Ron will enchant us with some of his poems, maybe some new ones. Unfortunately, Ron’s first two book of poems Among the Believers and Raising the Dead are long out of print. I wish Hub City would reprint them in a single volume.

Join us this evening, April 18th, for a signing and reading with Ron Rash at 5:00 and 5:30.