Category Archives: Poetry

Mary Jo Bang in Elegy has a poem entitled “Evidence” which carries over to a second page and ends How changed we are. Otherwise no longer exists. There is only stasis, continually Granting ceremony to the moment. And these lines … Continue reading →

From Bones in Their Wings a set of ghazals by Lorna Crozier. My Tai Chi master has Parkinson’s, a slight shudder in the stillest pose. This is the first couplet or sher in the second ghazal in the collection. It … Continue reading →

I sampled her Strawberries. I was impressed by Beth Follet’s Pedlar Press production of Small Arguments with its spacious and airy layout of these delicate poems. The perfect pairing of publisher and poet returns with Light by Souvankham Thammavongsa. Look … Continue reading →

How Hug a Stone by Daphne Marlatt has towards the middle of this book part travelogue and part commemoration a piece that is marked by contrasting one day scurrying to avoid the incoming tide and a final day of ashes … Continue reading →

Respect for fair use and copyright prevent me from quoting the poem in its entirety — at one run without interruption. An impulse to praise and its many virtues make me quote bit by bit with interspersed commentary. First off … Continue reading →

BookThug has re-issued Karen Mac Cormack’s first book of poetry Nothing By Mouth. There one finds a segment of a sequence that stands alone as a statement. details) sifting the desert letters swirl the grains ignite in her eye (he … Continue reading →

George Elliott Clarke. Execution Poems. “Haligonian Market Cry”. The poem is structured as a succession of sexually suggestive cries flogging vegetables and fruit interspersed with snatches of non-English phrases. Abundance is celebrated by the English bits. I got hallelujah watermellons … Continue reading →

It is a poem ostensibly about deer feeding on roses. So you wonder how the ending came to be. How the lantern came to hold a place as an image for the house you grew up in. And that which … Continue reading →