Geoffrey Brock

        after Miroslav Holub
Having risen from a branch of the Ni River
during a lull in the Battle of Spotsylvania,
she settled on the blue upper lip of a dead
Confederate corporal, weary. As Union troops

began their fifth assault on Laurel Hill
she began to molt, her cloudy wings
clearing with the weather, her spectral body
brightening and swelling, as if the life

spilling from the ephemeral creatures around her
were filling her. Soon, she rose again,
joining the sudden frenzied cloud of her kind
congregating then above the creek's

fizzing waters, their wings ten thousand leaded
windows pierced by an angling evening sun.
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James Wither's manuscripts of his poems
“Cambridge University Archives Rural Poet James Withers"

"Local Cambridge historian Mike Petty said Withers was a contemporary of Byron and Keats—and was penning notes at the same time Charles Dickens was forging a career as a writer. 'These scraps of paper, handwritten on the back of bills and tax returns, are not only a record of a country poet—but a record of a county area, they are a unique snapshot,' he said."

via BBC

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Cover of "The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly"

“'The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly' is a public poem in a number of ways, even if it doesn’t make any grand (or correct) statements about our immediate political situation or about anything that very many people really know or care about. It is a poem about a private figure who became a public one only after his death and only by chance. A poem about a work of monumental public art and about trying to make sense of that. A poem about race and religion."

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