Woods Are on Fire

Fleda Brown is professor emerita at the University of Delaware and is a faculty member of the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. She served as Delaware’s poet laureate from 2001 to 2007 and is the author of nine poetry books, including The Devil’s Child and Fishing With Blood, and two memoirs, including Driving with DvořÁk (Nebraska, 2010). Her work has twice appeared in The Best American Poetry and has won numerous awards, including a Pushcart Prize and the Felix Pollak Prize.

"This is the kind of light-filled book we use to see the world more clearly and make our way forward-and we do it with a poem in each hand, as Kooser recommends."-Julie Larios, Numero Cinq "The complexities and complications of the poet who is among and yet stands back, and who understands the limits of life yet yearns and hungers for everything life has within it, are offered in The Woods Are On Fire, and the pleasures and challenges of great poetry can both be found in this necessary book by Fleda Brown."-Adrian Koesters, Split Rock Review “Reading a poem by Brown is a lesson in how to read one’s life, how each small thing, each seemingly casual detail, is in fact connected to perceptions and understandings of profound significance that we can all divine if only we calm our vision enough to fully experience the perishing present.”-World Literature Today

• Acknowledgments    Introduction by Ted Kooser    Backfires    I. from Fishing with Blood (1988)Garden    To Mark, My Retarded Brother, Who Lived 20 Years and Learned to Speak 300 Words    Arch    For Grandmother Beth    A Plain Philosophical Choice    Out Back    Canoe    Whaler    Catching Turtles    Fishing with Blood    Apalachee Bay    The Scholar’s Cat    Saving a Life    He Says How It Was    Emily Dickinson’s Love    Love, for Instance    from “O’Keeffe”    She Learns to Walk    She Learns to Talk    A New Yorker Visits Her Exhibition    She Marries the Photographer    An Expert Explains Her Work    II. from Do Not Peel the Birches (1993)Elvis at the End of History    Do Not Peel the Birches    A Long and Happy Life    Learning to Dance    After the Rain    Loon Cries    Night Swimming    My Father Takes My Retarded Brother Sailing    If I Were a Swan    Dock    A Few Lines from Rehoboth Beach    Mississippi River, near Cape Girardeau, MO     Mother of the Bride Dress    St. Paul’s and St. George’s Church, Edinburgh    Farthest North Southern Town    Burdett Palmer’s Foot    Kitty Hawk    Anhinga    Bombay Hook    III. from Breathing In, Breathing Out (2002)Fourth of July Parade, Albion, WA    Buying the King-Sized Bed    Cosmic Pitching    Somewhere    Dogs    Highway 5    The Poet Laureate Addresses the Delaware Legislature Opening Its First Session after September 11    Rumors of Changes Circulate on Penguins    Cow Falling    Spring    Leaving Lewisburg    Mary Rose Quotes James Joyce on the Cliffs at Bray    Sunday Morning    Chicken Bone    Hyperspace    Language    Chat    For the Inauguration of William Jefferson Clinton, 1997    Your Body    I Write My Mother a Poem    Einstein on Mercer Street    IV. from The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives (2004)Tillywilly Fog    I Escape with My Mother in the DeSoto    Elvis Aron and Jesse Garon    Memphis Discovers Elvis    Elvis Goes to the Army    Shaking Hands with Nixon    Sputnik, 1957    Elvis Sings Gospel    Industrial Teflon Comes into Use for Kitchen Pots and Pans    Bus Stop    The Night before Her Third Marriage, She Watches a Rerun of Elvis’s Comeback Performance    Elvis Acts as His Own Pallbearer    Mrs. Louise Welling Spots Elvis at Harding’s Market    I Visit the Twenty-Four Hour Coin-Op Church of Elvis    Elvis Reads “The Wild Swans at Coole”     from “Graceland”     Elvis’s Bedroom    Lisa Marie’s Favorite Chair    The Mirrored Stairwell    The Meditation Garden    V. from Reunion (2007)If Names Started Coming Loose    Biology Lesson    What It Was Like    Fayetteville Junior High    Knot Tying Lessons: The Slipknot    Makeup Regimen    Mouse    Trillium    Small Boys Fishing under the Bridge    Light    Ode to the Buffman Brothers    Wild Lily of the Valley    No Heron    Knot Tying Lessons: The Perfection Knot    Knife    Bladder Campion    The Death of Cleone    Poem for Our Twelfth Wedding Anniversary    Through Security    Lady’s Slipper    VI. from Loon Cry: Selected and New Michigan Poems (2010)Scavengers    Crouching    Hawsers    Wild Turkeys    Deer    Northern Pike    Chicory    VII. from No Need of Sympathy (2013)Year of the Tent Caterpillars    For, Or, Nor    Sugar, Sugar    The Purpose of Poetry    The Kayak and the Eiffel Tower    My Father and Hemingway Go Fishing    Roofers    Hare’s Breath    God, God    Dancing at Your Wedding    Child Labor    Here, in Silence, Are Eight More    Short History of Music    Big Bang    Worms    Felled Tree    Translation    Building a Cathedral    Talk Radio    Fourteen Lines    VIII. New PoemsThe Swan Flies Straight at Me    Elegance    Unfurl    The Undoing    News    On a Day That Bombs    Feeding the Maggots    Bees    Taxol    Cancer Support Group with Painting by Monet    Snoring    Lesson    Mute Swan    Tulips    The Elk Farm    Edward Hopper’s Automat    Silence    What Happens    Fawn    Wheel    The War    Pike    Muskrat    Tiny Fish    Every Day I Touch Things    View from Space    The Gospel Truth    Speed    Blueweed    Refrigerator    Poem for Record Players    The Sex Life of Anacondas    The Bar Mitzvah    Mummy Exhibit    Caterpillars    Getting Free    July 20, 1944    Wild    Asian Carp    Grateful    Protection    Cedar Waxwing    The Poem I Was Going to Write    Reading the Smithsonian Magazine    Surrounded by People    I Say Your Name    Five Moons    Mushrooms