Poetry and About Poetry

Pick up a copy of The Piedmont Virginian Summer 2015 edition to read two of my poems.

Pick up a copy of The Piedmont Virginian Summer 2015 edition to read two of my poems.

Buffalo Yoga: Poems by Charles Wright My rating: 4 of 5 stars Charles Wright’s Buffalo Yoga poems contain no buffaloes, but do interweave personal memories with the natural world, history and biography. “Everything’s more essential in norther light, horses/Lie down in the dry meadow,/Clouds trail, like prairie schooners…” And the losses of the past are like the absence of buffalo from a plain. “Thus do we take our deaths up on our shoulders and walk and walk,/ Trying to get back Wright’s prosy and natural style still has a subtle eloquence, and only falters a bit in the latter third of the collection. But it is a worth collection, accessible, yet deep. View all my reviews

Buffalo Yoga: Poems by Charles Wright My rating: 4 of 5 stars Charles Wright's Buffalo Yoga poems contain no buffaloes, but do interweave personal memories with the natural world, history and biography. "Everything's more essential in norther light, horses/Lie down in the dry meadow,/Clouds trail, like prairie schooners..." And the losses of the past are like the absence of buffalo from a plain. "Thus do we take our deaths up on our shoulders and walk and walk,/ Trying to get back Wright's prosy and natural style still has a subtle eloquence, and only falters a bit in the latter third of the collection. But it is a worth collection, accessible, yet deep. View all my reviews

The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison by Maggie Smith My rating: 5 of 5 stars Maggie Smith’s new collection looms rich in terrible “grim” fairy tales, told with a hint of the child’s voice but very much adult in theme and honesty. Veils slip aside briefly to suggest ancient myths and stories told over the eons to try to help us understand the falling of stars and dying of everything we love or touch. Wolves and birds are mythic beings. The forest invades our nightmares and day dreams. The common lurches into the eerie and back again. The commonplace weirds into the uncommon: “The seatbelt buckle branded/its open mouth into your wait.” Nature dreams itself into our daylight: “Wrens pinned like brooches/to the trees, singing, their eyes glass beads.” Always, death lurks in the eyes of the forest and in the inanimate briefly animated: “When the stone/healed behind you, it sounded like a lid closing over a tomb.” Smith identifies with other beings, becoming the other, allowing the other to