The woman in this poem is one I’ve seen near a community Victory Garden dating from WW2, called Dowling Gardens, on the western bluff above the Mississippi River. I may have seen her in the old orchard, too, adjacent to the gardens, where gleaners come to gather fallen apples and pears, varieties no one plants anymore. Some say it’s the sweetest fruit, and some say the skins are a little tough. We’re not related, but these are my people.
Connie Wanek on "Mulberries in the Park" |
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"On Poetry and Mourning"
"I’m looking back at the Hafez that Bita sent me and reading it again. Grief there seems to produce the ghosts of those you’ve loved. The river by which you weep is slow. You can take your time. Your tears mingle in its stream. I don’t read poems to know the future. I read them to hold the future at bay. Grief may be the knowledge that you can’t do that in the end, that the future won’t be like the past."
via THE YALE REVIEW |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Michael Joseph Walsh on Sara Nicholson's April
"Maybe what Nature and Art have in common is their amenability to being read—the fact that both can be the object of lectio divina, the contemplation of the 'living word.' In April the gods have left us, but Nature, like poetry, is being written, and can be read. The world is a poem, or a painting, and a poem, in turn, is the world, or at least a world (an 'imaginary garden with real toads in [it],' if you will)." |
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