Dinner with Dona Adélia
By Essay Issue 91
Jessica Goudeau’s translations of the work of Adélia Prado, Brazil’s foremost living poet, appear in Image issue 91. The night I met Dona Adélia, she told me my husband was the perfect man. She came to the University of Texas for a poetry reading with her longtime translator and editor, Ellen Doré Watson. At…
Read MoreHow Beautiful the Beloved
By Poetry Issue 54
Occult power of the alphabet— How it combines And recombines into words That resurrect the beloved Every time. ________Breaking open The dry bones of each Letter—seeking The secret of life That must be hidden inside. § Fate not just a pair of scissors Waiting at the end to cut the thread, But there at the…
Read MoreA Conversation with Les Murray
By Interview Issue 64
In 2007, Dan Chiasson wrote in the New Yorker that Australian poet Les Murray is “now routinely mentioned among the three or four leading English-language poets.” His awards include the Grace Leven Prize, the Kenneth Slessor Prize, the Petrarch Prize, and the prestigious T.S. Eliot Award. In 1999 he was awarded the Queens Gold Medal…
Read MoreElegy for William Carlos Williams on the Eve of His 125th Birthday
By Poetry Issue 64
A chic Italian restaurant here on Rutherford’s Park Avenue. On the corner across the street: your home, sold to strangers. All those bright flowers you & Flossie tended to in your backyard gone. A piece of still-warm bread & a bottle of Chianti I had to bring myself. It’s a dry town still, where the…
Read MoreA Conversation with Marilyn Nelson
By Interview Issue 69
The daughter of a Tuskegee Airman and a teacher, Marilyn Nelson was brought up primarily on military bases and started writing while still in elementary school. She earned her BA from the University of California, Davis, and holds postgraduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (MA, 1970) and the University of Minnesota (PhD, 1979). Her…
Read MoreA Conversation with Luci Shaw
By Interview Issue 75
Luci Shaw is attentive to balance, cultivating both an active engagement with the arts in culture and the solitude necessary to listen and catch at language. Her twelve acclaimed collections of poetry include What the Light Was Like, Harvesting Fog, and the forthcoming Slow Pleasures. Her nonfiction includes Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination, and…
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