More on: poetry

A Private Letter A Poet on Writing for Composers NOT LONG AGO, I was giving a reading with another poet who has written libretti for composers. I hadn’t heard anything of his musical collaborations for a few years, and asked him if he was still working in the opera world. “I’m doing something for television,”…

National Geographic Explorer You swing through the broad high-branching trees and what hangs from your breast, your stolen charge, flounces like a rag doll clung to by a child whose parents disappeared behind a train’s ashen door. You hover above, primate Eve, as if what you hold could forever be held past passing eons and…

Eight, mouthy, and proud, you didn’t want his help, so while you watched the stairs revolve below your feet with every gust, your father watched you climb the last three flights dizzy, on your hands and knees, before your brother, crouched by the door, jumped out to scare you, and you missed the step. Which…

Tweaked out on her mother’s meth, the twelve-year-old walks the county roads of my childhood, sees stars in a sky crow-feather black, finds the pack of wild dogs, the teeth of the mottled Lab less frightening than her uncle and his bristle-brush whiskers. There’s little left to do here but grow long and mean, to…

Early light brightens the blue shutters, overspilling the foot of the bed we sleep in. It is quiet yet…deep and tidal when I hear the light say, You will not be given to do everything you want. I remain quiet, as nearly poised as the edge of salt in the air that fills the room.…

I ran down the emergency-room ramp, holding Jon in one arm, pressing the cut with the other, and passed through the sliding glass doors into a narrow corridor lined with Saturday-night gurneys and men and one woman, all slumped or lying down on the black and white checkered tile, all clutching what seemed concussions and…

The first angel Ian drew was silent as the sun on empty fields of snow. Nothing was fast or slow, the world not yet begun. The second angel Ian drew sang green out of the ground. Birds of the air, rejoice. Let fire find its voice, each river its own sound. The third angel Ian…

The Joseph lilies sway, in choir, a silent chorus of white-coifed nuns; you stand, distant from them, child of God, suffering God. On sodden fields a flock of chittering starlings shifts; the eye is never worn with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. Leaves of the eucalyptus multiply and your solicitous murmurings sound like…

They, too, have stood, smitten and bemused, angered at the violence of kings, caught between a rock and the roiling ocean, between the glimpsed shadow of a retributive deity and the gentle features of he-who-is-to-come; they would fasten down the voice they hear calling to them, though they know there is no voice, only that…

If Penetrated by Light: Five Poets Consider the Darkness The Fortieth Day by Kazim Ali (BOA Editions, 2008) Astonishment: Selected Poems of Anna Kamienska ——-Translated by Grazyna Drabik and David Curzon (Paraclete Press, 2007) The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems of Adélia Prado ——-Translated by Ellen Watson (Wesleyan University Press, 1990) Hovering at a…