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1. Letter from the Editors

Dear Readers,

Our prose editor is away this week.

Enjoy this week's poems!

Warmest regards,

Don Selby & Diane Boller

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2. Sponsor Messages

 Diode Editions Book & Chapbook Contests
Diode Editions Book & Chapbook Contests Now Open. At Diode Editions our mission is to beautifully craft our books, and to fanatically support our authors.

 Palm Beach Poetry Festival
January 15-20, 2018, Delray Beach, Florida 
Deadline to apply for workshops: November 10
Workshops, readings, interview, gala and performance events with Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Chard deNiord, Beth Ann Fennelly, Ross Gay, Rodney Jones, Phillis Levin, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Tim Seibles. Admission is by application. For more information, visit www.palmbeachpoetryfestival.org or email srw@palmbeachpoetryfestival.org

 Vermont College of Fine Arts MFAs in Writing
Vermont College of Fine Arts offers a traditional low-residency MFA in Writing program—now celebrating its 35th year—along with a residential MFA in Writing & Publishing program.

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3. Poetry News Links

News and reviews from around the web, updated daily:

• Amy Gerstler reviews Matthew Zapruder's Why Poetry. (Los Angeles Review of Books)
• Molly Worthen implores us to memorize poems. (The New York Times)
• David Roderick introduces Luis J. Rodríguez’s "Heavy Blue Veins: Watts, 1959". (San Francisco Chronicle)
• John McAuliffe reviews New Collected Poems by Marianne Moore, edited by Heather Cass White. (The Irish Times)
• Rebecca Foust introduces "Woodcutter's Wife," by Kristina Bicher. (Women's Voices for Change)
• Jonathan Ball briefly reviews books by Sylvia Legris, Shirley Camia, Stephen Cain and Molly Peacock. (Winnepeg Free Press)
• Barry Schwabsky reviews The Astropastorals by Douglas Crase. (Hyperallergic)
• Gerald Stern's Galaxy Love reviewed by David Kirby. (The New York Times)
• Terrance Hayes introduces a poem by Danez Smith. (The New York Times)
• Jill Bialosky's Poetry Will Save Your Life: A Memoir reviewed by Janet Saidi. (The Christian Science Monitor)
• Rachel Hadas on Mary Jo Salter's The Surveyors. (Los Angeles Review of Books)
• Reading midcentury works by Robert Penn Warren, Maya Angelou, and others "is to see anew the truth that Appomattox was as much a beginning as it was an end," says Jon Meacham. (The New York Times)
• And more...

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4. New Arrivals

These new arrivals are available for purchase via Poetry Daily/Amazon.com.

• Think of Lampedusa, Josué Guébo (University of Nebraska Press)
• In a Language that You Know, Len Verwey (University of Nebraska Press)
• Unreconciled: Poems 1991-2013, Michel Houellebecq, tr. by Gavin Bowd (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Fiends Fell, Tom Pickard (Flood Editions)
• Madness, Sam Sax (Penguin Books)
• Witch Wife, Kiki Petrosino (Sarabande Books)
• Set to Music a Wildfire, Ruth Awad (Southern Indiana Review Press)
• Miami Century Fox, Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, tr. by Eduardo Aparicio (Akashic Books)
• Beneath the Spanish, Victor Hernandez Cruz (Coffee House Press)

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5. This Week’s Featured Poets

The work of the following poets will appear as Today's Poem on the days indicated:

Monday - Derek Sheffield
Tuesday - Nancy Keating
Wednesday - Eoghan Walls
Thursday - Robert Hunter Jones
Friday - Carolyn Miller
Saturday - Ryan Wilson
Sunday - Wendy Mnookin

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6. Featured Poets August 21, 2017 - August 27, 2017

These and other past featured poets may be found in our archive:

Monday - David Budbill
Tuesday - Maureen N. McLane
Wednesday - Randy Blasing
Thursday - Ned Balbo
Friday - Mary Jo Salter
Saturday - Adrienne Su
Sunday - Anders Carlson-Wee

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7. Last Year’s Featured Poets

These poems will be retired from our archive during the coming week.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips, "Violins"
Susanna Brougham, "Making History"
Richard Jones, "Waterloo"
Laura McKee, "Balzac"
Kimberly Johnson, "Folio"
Bob Hicok, "A Marxist interpretation of rivers"
William Woolfitt, "Swing Low"
Dermot Bolger, "Little Xs"

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8. Poem From Last Year

Little Xs

Unexpectedly this October afternoon, the telescope turns, 
I see myself, made small again, through its objective lens:

I am not the widower, who recently buried my wife, 
Nor the dutiful son who kept vigil while my father, 
Like a punch-drunk boxer, fought to out-fox death,

Demented and enraged, hands trapped in cartoon gloves 
To stop him pulling out the tube to his morphine pump.

Today we clear the house where he lived for sixty years. 
In the bedroom where I was born, my siblings recall

How, as children, their only clue to my birth occurring 
Behind this closed door were anxious instructions to pray.

When we open up the attic we discover the suitcase 
My mother packed for her last trip into hospital:

A wash-bag and talc, clothes she never got to wear home, 
A purse crammed with prayers and the folded letter 
I wrote, as a ten-year-old, for my sister to bring into her.

I spend one page telling her how good I'm being, then cram 
Three pages with scrawled Xs—each one to represent a kiss.

Last week a granddaughter she never knew sang on stage, 
Luminous and radiant, in a band named Little Xs for Eyes.

For four decades in a letter in a purse in a suitcase in this attic 
These galaxies of Xs were the banished eyes of a bewildered child.

But—unfolding them—I see myself stare out at who I am now, 
Across this life I could never have envisaged as I scrawled 
Untidy Xs for a woman I last saw smiling from a hospital bed,

Who sealed them in her purse when nurses shaved her head 
In preparation for the operation she would never recover from:

Praying that one day I might open her purse and be surprised 
To find my Xs returned to me: big Xs for kisses, little Xs for eyes.

Dermot Bolger
That Which Is Suddenly Precious: New & Selected Poems
New Island Books / Dufour Editions

Copyright © 2016 by Dermot Bolger
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission