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Dear Readers,
This week, we continue our prose series with "Smoothing the Serpent's Tooth," by Eric Gleibermann, from the summer issue of The Florida Review:
"One day in the last few weeks of his life, when he was having frequent coughing spasms, my father and I explicated Shakespeare's Sonnet 71. We had originally set out to read King Lear, his favorite play in the Shakespeare canon (he had read nearly all of them), but now the aggressive radiation seemed to be working only marginally, its effect outstripped by the destructive power of the spreading lung cancer, and a complete play seemed too demanding. He could, however, take poetic language fourteen lines at a time."
Look for it here.
Enjoy this week's poems!
Warmest regards,
Don Selby & Diane Boller
2. Sponsor Messages
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Poetry London Summer 2016 Issue
In the new issue of Poetry London, Jennifer Militello, an exciting U.S. poet new to the magazine joins Pascale Petit, alongside new work from Emily Berry, Ian Duhig, Rachael Boast & Jan Wagner & translations by Jack Underwood. Newcomers to Poetry London include Joey Connolly, Alex Houen & Natalya Anderson.
In the review & features section, Lawrence Kramer writes on setting poems to music, Karen McCarthy Woolf interviews Maura Dooley & reviews include books by Sarah Maguire, Stevie Smith & RF Langley.
http://poetrylondon.co.uk/subscribe/
3. Poetry News Links
News and reviews from around the web, updated daily: Simon Armitage's Pearl: A New Verse Translation reviewed by Peter Craven. (The Australian) Adrienne Rich's Collected Poems: 1950-2012 reviewed by Wayne Koestenbaum. (The New York Times) Ben Lerner's The Hatred of Poetry reviewed by Peter J. Leithart. (First Things) "Wildly precious time"- Matthew Dickman on suicide and mending. (KUOW) Tess Taylor and Ari Shapiro discuss new collections by Martha Collins, Solmaz Sharif, and Tyehimba Jess. (All Things Considered) New collections by Bernard O’Donoghue and Martina Evans reviewed by John McAuliffe. (The Irish Times) Vona Groarke's Selected Poems reviewed by Caitriona O'Reilly. (The Irish Times) Housman Country: Into the Heart of England, by Peter Parker, reviewed by Blake Morrison. (The Guardian) Osman Durrani reviews Goethe: A Very Short Introduction, by Ritchie Robertson, and The Essential Goethe, edited by Matthew Bell. (The Times Literary Supplement) And more...4. Selected New Arrivals
These and other new arrivals are available for purchase via Poetry Daily/Amazon.com.
The Ten Winners of the 2016 Whiting Awards, Ben Fountain, intro. (Whiting Foundation) Abandoned Angel, Burt Kimmelman (Marsh Hawk Press) The Rapture of Eddy Daemon, Daniel Y. Harris (BlazeVOX [books])5. This Week’s Featured Poets
The work of the following poets will appear as Today's Poem on the days indicated:
Monday - Haji Khavari / tr. Roger Sedarat
Tuesday - Edward Doegar
Wednesday - Philip Gross
Thursday - James Richardson
Friday - Midge Goldberg
Saturday - Alicia Ostriker
Sunday - Thomas McCarthy
6. Featured Poets July 11 - 17, 2016
These and other past featured poets may be found in our archive:
Monday - Tom French
Tuesday - Robin Becker
Wednesday - Derick Mattern
Thursday - Cynthia Huntington
Friday - Rosalie Moffett
Saturday - Gary Soto
Sunday - Ben Jackson
7. Last Year’s Featured Poets
These poems will be retired from our archive during the coming week.
Orlando Ricardo Menes, "St. Rose Counsels the Washerwomen of Lima"
Megan Sexton, "Ode to Silence"
Richard Siken, "Lovesong of the Square Root of Negative One"
Benjamin S. Grossberg, "McGuire's Twenty-Five Minutes"
Timothy Steele, "Changing of the Guard"
Daneen Wardrop, "Gettysburg Cyclorama, Northwest Panel"
Hannah Sanghee Park, "Strip"
8. Poem From Last Year
Changing of the Guard
Prior to sunrise, as it's growing light,
Nocturnal birds relay
The burden of their vocal arts
To their diurnal counterparts.
An owl hoots as a coda to the night;
A finch chirps as a prelude to the day.
It is as if the birds, wings notwithstanding,
Are passing a baton.
They make me think, as they converse,
Of when my mother was a nurse:
Each morning, as the night shift was disbanding,
The day shift at her hospital came on.
Our breakfasts fit whichever shift she drew.
By an unspoken rule,
Leaving for work or coming from it
She held a little family summit.
(We kids, the instant she excused us, flew
Out of the kitchen to prepare for school.)
I liked the way the shifts aligned, the flow
And order they created.
While the white dress all nurses wore
Expressed their brisk esprit de corps,
Their caps had different designs to show
The colleges from which they'd graduated.
Listening to the birds, I can't infer
Which schools they went to. Still,
Like sensitively trained musicians,
They're good at managing transitions,
Just as my mother and her colleagues were
In looking after the infirm and ill.
So though it is a signal to a mate
Most birds send through the air—
Or else a claim to territory—
Their chorus seems to tell a story
Of former mornings and to correlate
The continuities of song and care.
Timothy Steele
The Yale Review
July 2015
Copyright © 2015 by Timothy Steele
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
Copyright © 2016. All rights reserved.
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