Lucie Brock-Broido (1956-2018) was a true gift to poetry. I attended her SAL lecture in 2015, and bought this book — Stay, Illusion (Knopf, 2013), and of course I brought it home and tucked it onto a shelf, in a prominent location, and didn’t read it. I’m so happy that it was waiting for me, patiently and […]
Although Jayne Marek is a relative newcomer to the Pacific Northwest (transplanted from Indiana, where she taught at Franklin College), she is a fast learner. I imagine her striding about the landscape — trails, riversides, boggy acres — notebook, camera, and guidebook in hand — translating all of it into poems and photographs for an […]
This afternoon I am Bellingham-bound, where I will be attending the 2018 Arbuthnot Honor Reading at Western Washington University, featuring Naomi Shihab Nye. I’ve spent the morning reading Tim McNulty’s Ascendance, a book which is so much about place that it could serve as a field guide. Look for yarrow, buckwheat, tall spindly ears of deer, pearly […]
These poems need to be read aloud. Jane Hirshfield, in a cover blurb, calls Toucan Nest, “a book of burnished, lapidary attention.” And it is. Each bird and bat is polished like a gem. The poems are dense with bright nouns, and repeated sounds. The lines in almost all of the poems are short, and short […]