Southern Messenger Poets – serie

Written by the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Pharaoh, Pharaoh is a meditation on time, memory, inheritance, and the irony of loss, loss of one's land, of one's past, of love itself. With senses keenly attuned to every nuance of light and landscape, Claudia Emerson Andrews invests her lines with a scriptural fire. She captures equally and with apparent effortlessness the bewilderment of the culturally bereft in the ""stuttered eloquence"" of an auctioneer and the evanescence of appearances in the image of a dying firefly ""coughing up light.""In this postlapsarian pastoral of the modern Southeast, Andrews summons a cast of characters bound to times and places of desolation, yet unable to leave because it is that very desolation, the plagues, the scourges, the losses and heartbreak, that has defined them. Their collective cry of exultant despair is compressed in the astonishing final lines of ""Plagues"": ""Pharaoh, Pharaoh, as if there were something keeping us, as if we could be let go.""Andrews brings to these poems a vision so clear, so miraculously right, that the pages themselves seem suffused with the scents of sunlight and new-mown hay. Pharaoh, Pharaoh is a lovely, spellbinding reminder of what we discard, what we keep, and why.

In Doing Lucretius, Sidney Burris crosses a sensibility shaped by a classical education with a contemporary culture that finds such an education increasingly remote and forbidding. Molding his artistry and buttressing his response to modern society with the literature of the ancient world, Burris displays in his work an unabashed reverence for the various traditions, literary, cultural, familial, that guide him, but maintains that these conventions must now and again be interrogated and overthrown.The poems trace several themes through the poet's boyhood to the threshold of his middle age: fi‚ight, escape, distance, cultural displacement, themes that are strained by the counter-pressures of literary, political, and artistic impulses. The desire for fi‚ight and its attendant concerns are foremost among these motifs, fi‚ight to the sea, to love in all its varied and alluring forms, even to dying in its many manifestations.With these modes of motion comes an obsession with historical characters who have had their own travails resolved by fi‚ight, both psychological and actual: Achilles, Ulysses, Circe, and above all Lucretius, Virgil, and Dante, the perennial sustainers. There are also friendships recorded throughout the volume that arise out of the poet's deep need for a passionate community of nourishing relationships to help him survive the difficulties of a well-lived life, which he describes in ""The Celebration"" as ""the art / of living art / as if art's enough.""Blending southern narrative language with the melodic intensity of the impassioned lyric voices of the classical world, Doing Lucretius is a profound and deeply satisfying collection.

The House of Blue Light is the second collection of autobiographical ""memory poems"" by Catholic-school-boy-gone-bad-turned-poet-made-good David Kirby, a stand-up comic of verse if ever there was one: ""in Stardust Memories . . . these wise space aliens who visit Earth . . . tell [Woody Allen] that if he really wants to serve humanity, / he should tell funnier jokes, wait, that's my duty, / I think, that's my public duty! Because sooner or later, / we all turn upside down.""Wearing both heart and wit on his sleeve, Kirby confides in longish narrative poems events he actually or vicariously experienced, as a child, a teen, a young man, and now, as well as some future scenes he imagines. Literary theorists Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes; Little Richard and Muhammad Ali; Herman Melville, James Dickey, and Henry James; friends, family, personal heroes, and acquaintances, including the Ah Oui Girl of Paris and Tige Watley's Whoah of Baton Rouge, are all equally alive in Kirby's poems.As Walt Whitman did, Kirby offers a first-person speaker as a proxy for everyone else (""Who, including ourselves, / knows what we know and when we know it?""), achieving a unity and accessible authenticity rare in poetry. A fun house, ""a mishmash for sure,"" The House of Blue Light is a delightfully entertaining, irreverent, erudite collection of commentary piling upon commentary that brings us ""that one element so largely absent / from our quotidian existence, i.e., surprise.

Sometimes a fact swings down like a hammer and we are changed. The fact of loss, the fact of desire, and all the wild, unruly facts of history hammer down and sparks fly up. This, then, is a collection of facts. In a rushing, rolling style, poems sweep to the edge of falling apart, take great delight in defying that dissolution, and come upon a thing redemptive and clarifying: the fact of love. In a world that ""doesn't really care / whether we live or die,"" Steve Scafidi writes, ""tell it you do and why."" From the unthinkable to the quietly heroic, somehow we have emerged. Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer celebrates that fact most of all.

In this eloquent long poem, Claudia Emerson employs the voices of two family members on a small southern farm to examine the universal complexities of place, generation, memory, and identity. Alternating between the voices of Preacher and Sister, Pinion is narrated by the younger, surviving sister, Rose, in whose memory the now-gone family and farm vividly live on: ""In the dream that recurs, like a bird returning, the place is still as it was, as though they went away, years ago, fully intending to be back by first dark.""Sister tells of her observances in day-to-day life in the 1920s and her struggle to take care of her father, grown brothers, and Rose, ""the change-of-life baby"", after the death of her mother: ""The hens had hidden their heads beneath / their wings; they blinded themselves as I dusted / the kneading bowl with fi‚our sifted fine as silk, and so / I disappeared as I sank my fists into it."" Preacher feels keenly the burden of running the farm and fears being the last one to live on the place: ""I was held fast there, pinioned, not / dying, growing numb and light, wait-crazed / and finally calm."" Both wrestle with a desire for independence and the duty to home they are bound to by birth; neither marries or leaves.Pinion is ultimately a wrenching elegy that Rose creates. She is the one who escaped, only to realise ""I survive them all, but I find I have become the house they keep.

In his compelling new collection, David Huddle writes, ""We think / we stand in the vivid colour of here and now / and view the past as drab black and white, / whereas the truth is , it's our future / that's the off-center, badly focused grayscale.""Spiraling between the tenses of time, David Huddle creates in these vibrant poems a defense against the encroachment of age through the resources of language and memory, imagination and art. Moments recollected, and admittedly embellished, from his own life and family seem appealingly familiar: a teenage dance, Grandmama's morning coffee, young daughters playing dolls. With age, wonder has become understanding, and so when intimations of his death arise in the midst of sharing a joke with his children, the poet shows us the comfort and peace that murky prospect may hold. Playful and fantastic narratives about penguin clans, Jane Goodall and the chimps, and what to do when it snaows offer wit and craft as further barriers against pain and despair. ""In my family we were /all good at dreaming,"" Huddle's closing poem notes. Undaunted, Huddle gives us in Grayscale not false hopes about our lives but a range of ways to transcend their limits.

In Late Wife, a woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. Though not satisfied in her first marriage, she laments vanishing from the life she and her husband shared for years. She then describes the unexpected joys of solitude during her recovery and emotional convalescence. Finally, in a sequence of sonnets, she speaks to her new husband, whose first wife died from lung cancer. The poems highlight how rebeginning in this relationship has come about in part because of two couples' respective losses. The most personal of Claudia Emerson's poetry collections, Late Wife is both an elegy and a celebration of a rich present informed by a complex past.

The scariest sentence in the English language is brief, threatening, and hopeful. It is deceptive, simple, and as common as water: anything is possible. This second collection by Steve Scafidi is haunted by the possible and ""the bells of the verb to be"" that ""ring-a-ding-ding calling us / to the holy dark of this first / warm night of Spring."" When anything is possible, Scafidi finds, horror is as likely as delight. In poems both meditative and defiant he mourns the eventual loss of all that we love and finds consolation, wherever possible, in the rhythm of common words and ""the sacred guesswork"" of the imagination. Here is the dangerous world we all have in common. Here is a brief and hopeful book. Steve Scafidi is the author of the poetry collection Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer, winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize. His poem ""The Egg Suckers"" received the 2005 James Boatwright Prize from Shenandoah literary magazine. He is a cabinetmaker and lives with his family in Summit Point, West Virginia.""Steve Scafidi's poem 'The Egg Suckers' made me laugh, fidget, and ponder my own path through this omnivorous world. It reminds us that things are constantly happening beneath our very feet, that a secret history is being forged that we'll never read about in the newspapers. Like Theodore Roethke, Scafidi describes a nature that is at least as nasty as it is nice and then lets us know that - oops! - we're on the menu, too. Re-reading 'The Egg Suckers,' I laughed again. And then I made breakfast."" - David Kirby

The Piercing celebrates the here and now while endorsing a deep faith in the necessity of the imagination. In response to life in a literal world, Christine Garren's lyric poems ignite belief in exhilaration. Ordinary settings - a park, a pond, a littered vacant lot, an attic room - through Garren's eyes reveal something extraordinary. For example, in ""February Snow,"" the poet surveys a winter scene through the windows of various rooms and reflects how ""Sometimes it is beautiful, in some of the minutes / then ordinary again - /... that feeling / of air in the midst of burial."" In ""The Well,"" she writes of reaching an impasse in a relationship: ""The exhilarating life is finished. We must accept it / this late afternoon and move / back into the rational world."" Spare, quiet, visual distillations of the physical and emotional dimensions of the moment define The Piercing with a driving energy at once delicate and fierce.Small piercing as if in the earlobe your leaving caused. Air is filling it now, time fills it,the view through these windows fills the tiny hole.The people on the street, the manic father,the other father carrying his child in pink - thismillimeter's width opening is for a decade to fit through.Look, there you go. There I go - there our landscape goes as ifthrough a fantastical roof's hole, the shingle pulled off, the nail off - our death isflying over the city.- ""The Piercing

The poems in The House on Boulevard St. were written within earshot of David Kirby's Old World masters, Shakespeare and Dante. From the former, Kirby takes the compositional method of organizing not only the whole book but also each separate section as a dream; from the latter, a three-part scheme that gives the book rough symmetry. Long-lined and often laugh-out-loud funny, Kirby's poems are ample steamer trunks into which the poet seems to be able to put just about anything, the heated restlessness of youth, the mixed blessings of self-imposed exile, the settled pleasures of home. As the poet Philip Levine says, ""The world that Kirby takes into his imagination and the one that arises from it merge to become a creation like no other, something like the world we inhabit but funnier and more full of wonder and terror. He has evolved a poetic vision that seems able to include anything, and when he lets it sweep him across the face of Europe and America, the results are astonishing.

From poems of memory and family through its extraordinary voyaging sequences ""Via Appia"" and ""To Ithaca,"" Ron Smith's Moon Road embodies the experiences and some of the more elusive lessons of marriage, fatherhood, teaching, sports, and travel. Domestic poems give way to poems of pilgrimage and witness, to poems of literary homage and metaphysical questioning. A mind nurtured in the mid-twentieth-century Deep South drifts north and west and finally abroad, and sometimes into visionary, mysterious pasts. With skeptical reverence, the poems hunger for and dramatize a search for immanence and transcendence. Many poems examine the fear of meaninglessness, the griefs of separation and alienation, and the limits as well as the powers of language.

In Glory River, David Huddle's poems pit precise observation, extravagant language, and humor against despair in an attempt to find a way to live in a new century in which the values of the past are dissolving and those of the future are frightening. Huddle opens with a sequence of exceptional tales about an imaginary hamlet in the mountains of Virginia. The residents of Glory River are rough, crude, and full of fight, but eager to tell their stories, ""to explain how / in that place they had become the people / they were."" Huddle also includes a series of poems exploring modern life, touching upon subjects as diverse as memory, family, art, politics, and pain. Accessible and often humorous, the poems in Glory River range from the strange and extraordinary happenings in the fantastical Virginia town to the painful, hopeful, and no less magical situations that can occur in real lives.

Poet Claudia Emerson begins Figure Studies with a twenty-five-poem lyric sequence called ""All Girls School,"" offering intricate views of a richly imagined boarding school for girls. Whether focused on a lesson, a teacher, or the girls themselves as they collectively ""school"" - or refuse to - the poems explore ways girls are ""trained"" in the broadest sense of the word.""Gossips,"" the second section, is a shorter sequence narrated by women as they talk about other women in a variety of isolations; these poems, told from the outside looking in, highlight a speculative voicing of all the gossips cannot know. In ""Early Lessons,"" the third section, children narrate as they also observe similarly solitary women, the children's innocence allowing them to see in farther than the gossips can. The fourth section offers studies of women and men in situations in which gender, with all of its complexities, figures powerfully.The follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Late Wife, Figure Studies upholds Emerson's place among contemporary poetry's elite.The Mannequin above Main Street MotorsWhen the only ladies' dress shop closed, she was left on the street for trash, unsalvageable, one arm missing, lost at the shoulder, one leg at the hip. But she was wearing a blue-sequined negligee and blonde wig, so they helped themselves to her on a lark - drunken impulse - and for years kept her leaning in a corner, beside an attic window, rendered invisible. The dusk was also perpetual in the garage below,punctuated only by bare bulbs hung close over the engines. An oily grime coated the walls, and a decade of calendars promoted stock-car drivers, women in dated swimsuits, even their bodies out of fashion. Radio distorted there; cigarette smoke moaned, the pedal steel conceding to that place a greater, echoing sorrow. So, lame, forgotten prank, she remained,back turned forever to the dark storagebehind her, gaze leveled just above anyone's who could have looked up to mistake in the cast of her face fresh longing - her expression still reluctant figure for it.

Over nearly fifty years, Eleanor Ross Taylor has established herself as one of the foremost southern poets of her generation. Captive Voices gathers selections from Taylor's five previous books along with a generous helping of new poems. Scintillating, unusual, passionate, and profound, the poems range from contemporary pieces about a bag lady on a bus, to historical pieces about settlers held hostage and a wartime nurse caring for British wounded, to intensely personal poems about her dislike for her grandmother and worries about her son. The title poem - a real tour de force - explores the notion of captivity on several levels as it speaks to the suffering we all endure, some of which is of our own making. Decidedly regional yet determinedly universal, the poems in this remarkable volume, along with a foreword by Ellen Bryant Voigt, attest to the singular talent of a woman justly described as ""a poet of genius.

In his first collection of poetry and prose, award-winning fiction writer Richard Bausch proves that he is also an accomplished poet. Penned over a span of many years, the poems in These Extremes deal with a wide variety of subjects. Many focus on Bausch's own family and relationships. In one long, touching poem, ""Barbara (1943-1974),"" the poet memorializes his oldest sister, who died young. He also offers two prose memory pieces, recollections from his childhood and adolescence. In these brief ""essays,"" Bausch draws loving but unsentimental portraits of his father, mother, and other relatives as he reflects on the sense of belonging that he gained from his family - something he hopes to pass on to his own children in this violent, chaotic world. In ""Back Stories,"" the center of the book, Bausch effortlessly weaves poems around familiar characters from history, literature, movies, and popular culture - including Thomas Jefferson, Shakespeare's Falstaff, Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Sam, the piano player from Casablanca. Decidedly accessible in form, theme, and expression, These Extremes will surprise and delight lovers of poetry and fans of Bausch's stories and novels.

Meeting a local woman at a service project in Appalachia, the narrator of Mike Carson's poem ""Muse"" hears from her ""Those words, iron twang of loss,"" that ""cut soft ideas of beauty out."" Carson's lean, spare collection The Keeper's Voice unflinchingly engages those hard ideas of beauty, of goodness. Direct and often colloquial in their language and traditional in their forms - blank verse, quatrains, sonnets - the poems' voices arise from a wide range of viewpoints and situations: from an altar boy thawing a frozen gate lock while early Mass goes on without him, to a returning Vietnam veteran who takes up bull riding; from a boy calling cows in the pre-dawn dark, to a narrator providing instructions for teaching crows to talk; from a new cop, a Christian who must shoot to kill in a ghetto bar, to a family discovering the ashes of a stillborn child among a dead sister's belongings. One poem interweaves locker room slogans with phrases from the Requiem Mass for a friend who died playing football; another centers around a single shout from a wife to her husband threatened by an untethered bull.Refreshingly straightforward, yet suffused with weight, maturity, and passion, The Keeper's Voice projects a wise and uncompromising vision.

With A Walk in Victoria's Secret, Kate Daniels crafts a bold, brassy, yet delicate vision of a woman's growth. Imbued with a unique poetic voice that is utterly feminist, these poems possess a fiery intensity for those abuses no woman can ever quite recover from, but also reveal the loving, forgiving temperament of the mother no woman can do without. From the title poem's unapologetic celebration of the breast to a belated apology to the girl who integrated her elementary school, to the awkward juxtaposition of elderly and young women in a gynecologist's office on September 11, 2001, Daniels provides a rich array of meditations on what it means to be a woman in our time. Buoyant and entertaining, singular in style, and exuberant in language, A Walk in Victoria's Secret offers an intimate look at women's experiences.

T. R. Hummer's new and characteristically pyrotechnic collection takes its title from the rare (in English) singular form of the common word ""ephemera."" In a work of startling originality, the poet presents a meditation on ephemerality from the point of view of the ephemeron itself as it passes, be it the individual, the atom, the particle.Hummer's work is existential and atemporal. The scope of the poems gradually broadens from the opening section, also called ""Ephemeron,"" through ""Either/Or,"" which is a fulcrum, on to plural ""Ephemera."" The vision that emerges is haunting, evoking the aftermath of a physical, psychological, and spiritual apocalypse.Relentless in its stalking of the boundary between being and nonbeing, Ephemeron becomes a tour-de-force that shines a spotlight into dark corners of Being, revealing yet more darkness.

Daringly realistic and artfully mediated by past and present, Claudia Emerson's Secure the Shadow contains historical pieces as well as poems centering on the deaths of the poet's brother and father. Emerson covers all aspects of the tragedies that, as Keats believed, contribute to our human collective of Soul-making, in which each death accrues into an immortal web of ongoing love and meaning for the living. Emerson's unwavering gaze shows that loss cannot be eluded, but can be embraced in elegies as devastating as they are beautiful.The macabre title poem refers to the old custom of making daguerreotypes, primitive photographs, of deceased loved ones. Other striking poems describe animal deaths - mysterious calf killings, a hog slaughter, the burial of a dead jay, ""identifiable / but light, dry, its eyes vacant orbits."" Death, as the speaker's heart and mind instruct her, exists in a shadow world. When the body disappears, the shadow also flees. By securing the shadow, the poet finds a representation of the dead's soul, a soul always linked to the body. Hence, Emerson's attention to the minute details of the body's repose - reflected in the long, related sequence of refrained poems - never allows its memory to fade.

David Huddle's latest collection, Blacksnake at the Family Reunion, shares intimate and amusing stories as if told by a quirky, usually reticent, great uncle. In ""Boy Story,"" a teenage romantic meeting ends abruptly when the boy's sweetheart realises they have parked near her grandmother's grave. The poem ""Aloft"" recalls a widowed mother's indignation after she receives a marriage proposal in a hot air balloon. Haunted by the words on his older sister's tombstone - ""born & died... then / a single date / in November"" - the speaker in one poem struggles to understand a tragic loss: ""The ampersand / tells the whole truth / and nothing but, / so help me God, / whose divine shrug / is expressed so / eloquently / by that grave mark.""Blacksnake at the Family Reunion continues Huddle's poetic inquiry into the power of early childhood and family to infuse adulthood with sadness and despair - an inquiry conducted with profound empathy for the fragility of humankind.

Through silence and song, death and rebirth, a sense of wonder pervades every minute of our lives. In The Man Who Saws Us in Half, Ron Houchin explores this idea from the first curiosities of childhood to the gradual skepticism that comes with age and the weight of practical concerns. In the whimsical poem ""The Lion That Finds You Asleep in His Dream,"" the sleeping figure relives the magical allure of youth, offered both gratuitously and ubiquitously: ""The moon's still high in its arc, / and you know / you spilled from this lion's heart."" With his unique and colloquial voice, Houchin allows the reader to experience familiar subjects anew, to admire the surrounding world with rekindled appreciation and awe.

Dying never / ends for us. It only slowly rearranges us, writes Steve Scafidi in his poignant new collection. Inspired by his own work as a cabinetmaker - defined by the peppery dust from the woodworker planing a walnut board, turning an oak spindle at the lathe, or honing chisels while gazing out a window - Scafidi's poems reveal both the tenuous and the everlasting nature of existence.

In Christian theology, a skandalon is a distraction from grace, a maze of error where we wander pointlessly, wasting our lives. To the ancient Greeks, a skandalon was the trigger of a trap. T. R. Hummer's labyrinthine new collection encompasses these meanings and more, as its poems take various paths - some beguiling, some grotesque, some instructive, some opaque - to unexpected destinations. Undergirding the collection is a series of progressive vignettes entitled ""Victims of the Wedding,"" which follows the quarrels and couplings of a human man and woman as well as the angel and demon who observe them.Skandalon presents poems that consider the subtle, tragic, and ridiculous responses of creatures who lose themselves in a world they had wrongly imagined to be their own.

With graceful lines swooping like a bird in flight, Claudia Emerson's newest collection explores the harsh realities of aging and the limitations of the human body, as well as the loneliness, fear, and anger that can accompany us as we live. Keenly observed and beautifully executed, these poems move from the grim façade that hides beauty-prosthetic eyes- to the beautiful scene that conceals violence-a rural retreat. Emerson also considers once common things that are fast becoming obsolete: cursive writing, telephone booths, barbers. At once hopeful and cognizant of all the reasons why humans might despair, these poems echo with remarkable insight into the true nature of life.

An account of spiritual survival through the practice of literary art, the poems in David Huddle's eighth collection, Dream Sender, move among a variety of poetic forms and voices. Here, a bear wonders why he could not have been a raccoon, a bird, or a meadow; and a five-year-old thrills to the forbidden taste of whiskey as he eavesdrops on his parents' after-dinner conversation. By turns outrageous and pragmatic, Huddle's poems acknowledge the powerful and disturbing currents of the contemporary world as they also explore the comfort and familiarity we find there.Huddle's poems illuminate the nature of relationships between family, friends, and even animals, celebrating their shortcomings, embarrassments, and eccentricities. At once frank and compassionate, Dream Sender finds both humor and poignancy in human imperfections.

This posthumous volume of poetry from Pulitzer Prize winner Claudia Emerson explores the suspended state of existence that illness imposes upon its sufferers - what she calls the ""impossible bottle."" With a strong will and a self-deprecating awareness of the instinct to seek meaning in metaphor, she confronts the indignities, fears, and moments of grace in a struggle with cancer. Her poems forge unlikely connections between the present reality and memories of the past, such as an MRI scan conjuring up images of a June expedition through a tunnel under a Maryland mountain.Rooted equally in the sterility of the hospital and the vitality of the natural world, Impossible Bottle mines the trappings of illness, showing how disease attempts to rob us of our humanity even as it reminds us of our mortality.

Bobby C. Rogers's second collection, Social History, listens hard to the voices of American characters and celebrates the gestures of ordinary life. The long lines of his narrative poems trace the undulations of southern speech, and his careful eye for detail reflects the influence of generations of storytellers, from authors like Robert Penn Warren and Eudora Welty to Rogers's own distant family members, living in ""decrepit houses where the floors sagged and the front rooms reeked/of snuff, bitter as the smell off a pile of clods beside an open grave, the scent of time that hadn't succeeded in passing.""In his beguiling evocations of the past, Rogers looks back with affection to the rhythms and rituals of growing up in small-town Tennessee. While his poems speak of a living connection to community and to the earth, they also acknowledge the growing need to question what we have been taught and to break free and make our own way in this world. Graceful and plainspoken, the poems of Social History bear witness to ways of living that, though past, are never truly lost.

A Horse with Holes in It, Greg Alan Brownderville's third collection of poetry, employs inventive phrasing and vivid imagery to construct a particular life marked by religion, confused by desire, dulled by alcohol, and darkened by death. But Brownderville also skillfully uses humor to soften the disquieting images that haunt these stanzas. Strange stories wind through these poems: Two method actors live as lovers in a wartorn city and take the stage in an empty playhouse. A poet confesses to killing thousands of Arkansas blackbirds via folk magic. A preteen boy, deeply involved in an underground religion, is pressured into marrying a dangerous demon. Brownderville's poems examine a soulscape wrecked almost beyond recognition and dig deeply through the ruins.

The percussive poems of Stripper in Wonderland move from birth to death, funk to hip-hop, and racism to religion as Derrick Harriell explores the life of a modern black man transplanted from the American Midwest to the Deep South.Harriell summons the ghosts of the past as he deals with the realities of the present. He carefully winds images and words together to produce powerful, often graphic, poems that inform our view of one another as they punch through our assumptions.