Yearly Archives: 2019

My Mistake – The Correct Version of the Poem “Leaving Green” from my Post on Canadian Poet Martha Royea, Dec. 30th, 2019 – Sorry, Martha!

Leaving Green Montreal, hot-as-hell August 1968. I lope along an early morning side street of modest homes wearing a black boy’s body, swinging the biggest boom box you ever saw […]

Martha Royea – #2 in the Patrick’s Poets Series – Poets I Met Through the Poetry Writing Retreats of Canadian Poet Patrick Lane

The Return Journey — After T.S. Eliot, The Return of the Magi “They’re coming! They’re coming back!” I went shouting, skirts flying and my hair not combed; I ran to […]

Words to Rouse us (Isaiah) – Poems of American Poet Philip Metres

Solstice Prayer In the name of the darkness, and of the light, in the name of the harness of winter’s ice. In the name of the other, and of the […]

Liz McNally – # 1 in a Series on Patrick Poets – Poets I Met Through the Writing Retreats of Canadian Poet Patrick Lane

Collect for the Homeless God of the broken night. Finder of empty doorways, shopping carts, cardboard blankets, fast food refuse, cigarette butts, dropped coins and nick of time naloxone kits. […]

That’s the Hard Part, Knowing the Darkness is There and Singing Anyway – The Lasting Words and Legacy of Canadian Poet Patrick Lane (1939-2019)

    God Walks Burning Through Me When I sleep the birds come to the garden With their gifts of seeds. Out of ice last year’s leaves of grass lift […]

Solstice – A Midnight when Noon is Born – The Dark-Day Cry of the Great English Poet Kathleen Raine

from The Northumbrian Sequence – Part IV Let in the wind Let in the rain Let in the moors tonight, The storm beats on my window-pane, Night stands at my […]

Gem of a Short Poem and a Hugely Long Blog Post – Thanks to British poet Don Paterson!!! And Canadian Novelist Guy Gavriel Kay! And Li Po and Du Fu!

The Poetry after Li Po I found him wandering on the hill one hot blue afternoon. He looked as skinny as a nail, as pale-skinned as the moon; below the […]

She’s Not Mad – She’s a Poet – Two Poems by the Great Canadian Literary Icon Susan Musgrave

from Winter ii Across the river, children are eating snow, their lips the colour of tiny kingfishers in the numbing cold. The delight they take in the melting of each […]

Not for the Faint of Heart – Francesca Bell’s Poems of the Merely Bad, the Really Bad and the Dreadful

Want Small wind tonight and my faced pressed to the flimsy screen. Owls ghost the hilltop trees, fledglings shrilling for food. They eat their own weight in rodents every night, […]

Dealing with Rejection! – Two Different Responses – Mark Jarman and Francesca Bell

from Unholy Sonnets # 34 Although I know God’s immensities can speak In sunlight’s parallels and intersections; although I know the spiritual technique For finding God in all things, when […]