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| Forthcoming from Salmon Poetry, April |
Hello you! Thanks for not giving up on this space. It's been more than a minute since my last posting. Why?
Well, just a quick recap: one near death experience, one global pandemic, and a new website with a confusing (to me) blogging application. But I miss the sense of talking poetry with the larger world so here I am again hoping to reconnect.
Most recently, I've been reading Singing at High Altitude by Jennifer Markell.
I've been enjoying this book not only for its strong narrative tensions but also for the way Markell moves easily between the natural world, the therapeutic world, and her own childhood. Here is a poem that I think does this particuliarly well:
The understated humor, the renactment of this time out of time, reminds me of Keats or Stevens. This is high lyric at its best. The poem feels incredibly contemporary but upon a second and then a third reading, it becomes timeless; a reckoning with the mind, or even the soul.
Almost all of the poems in
Singing at High Altitude are succint, employing only four or five stanzas to do their work.
It is this braiding of the human world with "Amber and Cobalt," or milkweed and ash, that I'm most drawn to. The voice under these poems brings me new angles for looking at the world and is always trustworthy, always more than fair. I find myself returning to the poems in
Singing at High Altitude that on a first look seem deceptively simple but upon a closer read are urging us to not only look more closely at the world around us, but these poems are also asking us to love it.
You will want your own copy of Singing at High Altitude, published by Main Street Rag, 2021.
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