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Last Call of the Dark

My review of Mary Crane’s Last Call of the Dark just went up today, on-line at Raven Chronicles. Follow the link to read the full review!

As a bonus for reading my blog, here’s a poem – about spring, which cannot get here fast enough for me.

Hazel Catkin

I greeted the first spring-like day
with exhaustion, no appreciation
of a small portion of sun
in gray mosaic, and a stiff wind.
I was tired. The retreating season
offered no space for my small needs,
as the world iced over in suspicion
and decent people passed away.

I once fell in love with a hazel catkin –
heads drawn together, breath quickened,
we gazed into its bright red styles
instead of one another’s animated faces.
I don’t need to recreate the love
but the fall – the descent into desire
as the buds swell up, the body warms,
and a blush reawakens into life.

—Mary Eliza Crane

Crane is a western Washington poet who has resided in the hills above the Snoqualmie Valley for nearly four decades. Our paths have crossed at poetry open mics in Kirkland’s Book Tree and at Easy Speak in Wedgewood (Seattle); she is a co-host of her local poetry night in Duvall. To learn more about Last Call of the Dark, see my review (of course), or visit Cirque Press.

And if you are looking for an open mic, you can find it here: Western Washington Poets Network.

Carey Taylor

THE LURE OF IMPERMANENCE, Carey Taylor, Cirque Press, 3978 Defiance Street, Anchorage, AK 99504, 2018, 73 pages, $15 paper, https://cirquejournal.com/

This morning I reread Carey Taylor’s debut collection, The Lure of Impermanence. Taylor covers a whole lifetime in this book, winding through childhood and adolescence, then marriage and children (with all those attendant fears), then the task of re-inventing a marriage after the children have grown up and left home.

I heard Taylor read this poem, “Post-Election,” at a Cirque celebration at Tsuga Art Gallery in Bothell in 2018. I love how it takes a political topic, marking it with the title, but then embodies a woman’s anguish in a very different image, something I’ll try my hand at later today.

Post-Election

At first they fed in multitudes, from
the high energy suet cube, hung
in the contorted filbert.

Then came week
upon week
of 20-degree weather.

At the icy shoulder of road,
a chickadee in daytime
torpor.

By the third week,
five feathered corpses
on frosted asphalt.

Who knew so many would not survive
that winter, next to the bay with its
foraging wetlands

or now, how much we need them,
to rise like Lazarus and sing
their sapphire songs.