What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems. In Books We’ve Loved, our editorial board members reflect on a book that has been particularly meaningful to them in the last year. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem from the book and an excerpt from the essay.
The willows are thinking again about thickness, slowness, lizard skin on hot rock, and day by day this imaging transforms them into what we see: dragons in leaf, draped scales alongside the river of harried, spring-stirred silt. The magpie recites Scriabin in early morning as a mating song, and home is just a place you started out, the only place you still know how to think from, so that that place is mated to this by necessity as well as choice, though now you have to start again from here, and it isn't home. Venus rising in the early evening beside the Travelodge, as wayward and casual as will, or beauty, or as once we willed beauty to be – though this was in retrospect, and only practice for some other life. Do you still love poetry? Below the willows, in the dry winter reeds, banjo frogs begin a disconcerting raga, one note each, the rustling blades grow green – and it tires, the lichen-spotted tin canteen suspended in the river weeds like a turtle up for air: such a curious tiredness deflected there. And what would you give up, what would you give up, in the beautiful false logic of math, or Greek? In the sum of the possible, long ago in the summer grass . . . Here beside the river I close my eyes: there the little girls lean continuously across a rusted sign that says Don't Feed The Swans and feed the swans. The swans are reasoning beings; the young cygnets, hatched from pins and old mattress stuffing, bright-eyed, learning what has bread, and what doesn't. What doesn't have to do with this is all the rest: one more chance to blow out the candles and wish for things we wished for that wouldn't happen unless we closed our eyes. Not the gingko or the level gaze, or the speaking voice beneath the pillow, or the waking in the morning with a name. But cloud – or grief, when grief is loneliness and you close your eyes. Speech, when speech is loneliness, and you close your eyes.
"She finely accumulates detail in her descriptions, absorbing the tensions of her own human awareness of nature, and the notions of animal consciousness and even the absence of consciousness. She manages to remain both reverent and witty; in the same poem, she interjects, 'Do you still love poetry?'"
"Featuring authors writing in 13 different languages, this year’s longlists expand the prize’s dedication to literary diversity in English. The selection criteria include the quality of the finished English language book, and the quality of the translation."
