Category Archives: Poetry

Recovering from a bout of illness it seems perversively bracing to read Joseph Brodsky from Nature Morte All talk is a barren trade. A writing on the wind’s wall. for it is back from the country of sickness that we … Continue reading →

These are the opening utterances and they gain by the cascade layout: each a step into the next. Loon tongue             muttertongue                         idiom savant. from “Glossolalia” in A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent by Gregory Mahrer. And so for day … Continue reading →

The semantic slip followed by the gesture going all the way. […] As one strokes a cat and feels the ridgy skull beneath the fur and tickles It behind its ears. The cat twists its head and moves it toward … Continue reading →

Kenneth Hopkins Collected Poems 1935-1965 “It was a Fatal Silence” Concluding couplet to the sonnet This love, though great, is gone, though deep, is done, Though precious, spent, seeking, is sought of none. I have known Hopkins as an epigramist … Continue reading →

Reminds me of Philip Pullman’s “dust” in his trilogy His Dark Materials. Joseph Brodsky fifth section from “Nature Morte” in the Selected Poems translated by George L. Kline. Dust is the flesh of time. Time’s very flesh and blood. I … Continue reading →