Yearly Archives: 2014

The Secret Life of Things – More Poems and Poets on Paying Attention

  Everything is Waiting for You Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no […]

Paying Attention – Rilke and Hirschfield

    from The Ninth Duino Elegy Nor does the wanderer bring down a handful of earth from his high mountain slope to the valley (for earth, too, is mute), but […]

Choose Life – The Gospel According to Spencer Reece

                                Chiaroscuro When the ficus beyond the grillwork darkens, when the rind cools down on […]

Acceptance or Anger – Poetry and Remembrance Day

Prayer Whatever happens. Whatever what is is is what I want. Only that. But that. Galway Kinnell (1927 – 2014) This small poem may  be  the bravest, if not most […]

Where The God Waits To Eat Us – Patrick Lane’s New Poetry Collection, Washita

FOR THE WOMAN WHO DANCED WITH THE ASHES OF HER SON Strange how beautiful when we are diaphanous, a bit of ripped muslin set against the sun, the wind soft […]

The Kiss of a Shark and Feet of a Sparrow – The Poems of Tim Seibles

Edge Traffic: solitude, the city — walking around. So many of us lost in it. Is love the secret nobody tells? In a small park daylight pulled its knife and […]

Christian Wiman and Greg Orr — How To Lighten Grief’s Gravity

I sometimes think art is useless in the face of extreme suffering, but then I remember Miklos Radnoti, Paul Celan, Anna Akhmatova, or Mandelstam—and I bow my head (to them) […]

Let’s Go Fly a Kite – Heaney and Pascoli – Part Two

The Seamus Heaney translations  of two poems by Giovanni Pascoli (1855 – 1912) published in the New Yorker after the death of Heaney (1938 – 2013) last August sent me scrambling […]

The Large Piccolo Cose (small things) of Giovanni Pascoli

Washerwomen Out in a field half-fallow and half furrowed, A plough is standing, no oxen-team in sight, Forgotten looking, half-hid in a mist-cloud. From the mill-pond comes the wet slapping […]

The Black Dog Speaks – Poetry and Depression – The Robin Williams’ Aftershock

                                Depression in Winter There comes a little space between the south side of a […]