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English poet Estill Pollock’s new collection is an ARK built to weather the flood of 21st century life.
“I have nothing left / To offer, except this poem,” Estill Pollock declares around the midpoint of his new collection ARK, and for anyone else this might seem an apology or lament; but Pollock’s poems encompass multitudes, and offer the reader entire worlds. His title of course suggests both a means of safety and sanctuary (the title of one section here), as well as a repository of sacred texts, and both are apt descriptions for this volume.
His hierophantic language demands much from the reader, but rewards in equal measure, and pleasure. His scope ranges over time and space, “in data streams / Of stars,” from “Neanderthals in Paris” to “AI execution codes” and “Cryptocurrency blockchain” carrying us over rising tides of (literal) water and war and all manner of floods that threaten to engulf us. A long account of “London in those times / Of empire” makes up much of the middle section; and even though it has been decades since he left his native America he devotes specific attention to its problematic history, and present. “Mason-Dixon” recounts the Original Sin of slavery, while more recently he observes how “American democracy eats / Its young—pockets emptied to Big Pharma / Big Banks, murder-cop trials, neo-Nazi podcast / Or demagogue variant QAnon.”
“Old worlds give up their dead,” he observes, “a skull / In tidal mud, looted barrows, souvenirs / Of species an archived fidelity, as though / We were disappearing from our own lives.” But Pollock’s ARK is here to preserve us. “This is about everything, and nothing” – in which respect it perfectly resembles life.
Estill Pollock’s publications include Constructing the Human (Poetry Salzburg, 2001) and the book cycle Relic Environments Trilogy (Cinnamon Press, Wales, 2012). His recent poetry collections, ENTROPY (2021) and TIME SIGNATURES (2022), are published by Broadstone Books. He lives in Norfolk, England.
Ark
by Estill Pollock
Pub Date: 8/15/2023
Publisher: Broadstone Books
ISBN 978-1-956782-43-1
Binding: PAPERBACK
Pages: 92
Price: $ 26.00
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A Drinking Song
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
William Butler Yeats
(1865-1939)
A Drinking Song
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freda kamphuis
closest-up
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The title poem, “Because I Love You, I Become War,” is a poem of feminist genius, deserving to be in the pantheon of all-time brilliant poems!
Sascha A. Akhtar, author of #LoveLikeBlood
Raw[ness] exudes from this collection of poems and poetics prose about love and war, both corporal and terrestrial. Whether speaking of “rose petals yawning like little girls, like the daughters I never bore,” or a California wildfire’s “yellowed skies” and “smoke taint,” even color is narrative in Eileen Tabios’ dexterous hands.
Eileen R. Tabios has released over 60 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in 11 countries and cyberspace. DOVELION: A FAIRY TALE FOR OUR TIMES (AC Books, 2021) is her first long- form novel. Her 2020 books include a short story collection, PAGPAG: The Dictator’s Aftermath in the Diaspora; a poetry collection, THE IN(TER)VENTION OF THE HAY(NA)KU (Marsh Hawk Press, 2019); and her third bilingual edition (English/Thai), INCULPATORY EVIDENCE: Covid-19 Poems.
Her award-winning body of work includes invention of the hay(na)ku, a 21st century diasporic poetic form, and the MDR Poetry Generator that can create poems totaling theoretical infinity, as well as a first poetry book, Beyond Life Sentences, which received the Philippines’ National Book Award for Poetry. Translated into 11 languages, she also has edited, co-edited or conceptualized 15 anthologies of poetry, fiction and essays. Her writing and editing works have received recognition through awards, grants and residencies.
Because I love you, I become war
Poems & Uncollected Poetics Prose
by Eileen R. Tabios
Pub Date: 5/30/2023
Publisher: Marsh Hawk Press, Inc.
ISBN-10 : 099865826X
ISBN-13 : 978-0998658261
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 332
Price: $ 22.00
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With Child
Now I am slow and placid, fond of sun,
Like a sleek beast, or a worn one:
No slim and languid girl—not glad
With the windy trip I once had,
But velvet-footed, musing of my own,
Torpid, mellow, stupid as a stone.
You cleft me with your beauty’s pulse, and now
Your pulse has taken body. Care not how
The old grace goes, how heavy I am grown,
Big with this loneliness, how you alone
Ponder our love. Touch my feet and feel
How earth tingles, teeming at my heel!
Earth’s urge, not mine,—my little death, not hers;
And the pure beauty yearns and stirs.
It does not heed our ecstacies, it turns
With secrets of its own, its own concerns,
Toward a windy world of its own, toward stark
And solitary places. In the dark,
Defiant even now, it tugs and moans
To be untangled from these mother’s bones.
Genevieve Taggard
(1894 – 1948)
With Child
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Finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize Listed in The Boston Globe’s Best Poetry Books of 2022.
Longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award in PoetryAmerican Book Award-winning poet dg okpik’s second collection of poems, Blood Snow, tells a continuum story of a homeland under erasure, in an ethos of erosion, in a multitude of encroaching methane, ice floe, and rising temperatures.
Here, in a true Inupiaq voice, dg okpik’s relationship to language is an access point for understanding larger kinships between animals, peoples, traditions, histories, ancestries, and identities.
Through an animist process of transfiguration into a Shaman’s omniscient voice, we are greeted with a destabilizing grammar of selfhood. Okpik’s poems have a fraught relationship to her former home in Anchorage, Alaska, a place of unparalleled natural beauty and a traumatic site of devastation for Alaskan native nations and landscapes alike. In this way, okpik’s poetry speaks to the dualistic nature of reality and how one’s existence in the world simultaneously shapes and is shaped by its environs.
dg nanouk okpik was born and spent much of her life in Anchorage, Alaska. She graduated from Salish Kootenai College with an AFA in Liberal Arts and Liberal Studies, and later attended the Institute of American Indian Arts, graduating with an AFA and a BFA in Creative Writing before receiving her MFA in Creative Writing from Stonecoast College. okpik has won the Truman Capote Literary Award, the May Sarton Award, and an American Book Award for her first book, Corpse Whale (University of Arizona Press, 2012).
Blood Snow
by Dg Nanouk Okpik
Publisher: Wave Books
Publish Date: October 18, 2022
Pages 96
Language: English
Paperback
EAN/UPC: 9781950268634
BISAC Categories:
Native American
Women Authors
Price $18.00
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Nevermore
Souvenir, souvenir, que me veux-tu ? L’automne
Faisait voler la grive à travers l’air atone,
Et le soleil dardait un rayon monotone
Sur le bois jaunissant où la bise détone.
Nous étions seul à seule et marchions en rêvant,
Elle et moi, les cheveux et la pensée au vent
Soudain, tournant vers moi son regard émouvant :
« Quel fut ton plus beau jour ! » fit sa voix d’or vivant
Sa voix douce et sonore, au frais timbre angélique.
Un sourire discret lui donna la réplique,
Et je baisai sa main blanche, dévotement.
– Ah ! les premières fleurs qu’elles sont parfumées
Et qu’il bruit avec un murmure charmant
Le premier oui qui sort de lèvres bien-aimées !
Paul Verlaine
(1844 – 1896)
Mon rêve familier
Poèmes saturniens
Photo: Willem Witsen, 1892
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Since I From Love
Since I from Love escaped am so fat,
I ne’er think to be in his prison ta’en;
Since I am free, I count him not a bean.
He may answer, and saye this and that;
I do no force, I speak right as I mean;
Since I from Love escaped am so fat.
Love hath my name struck out of his slat,
And he is struck out of my bookes clean,
For ever more; there is none other mean;
Since I from Love escaped am so fat.
Geoffrey Chaucer
(1343 – 1400)
Since I From Love
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To Star the Dark is the first new collection of poems by Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa, following her acclaimed prose bestseller A Ghost in the Throat
The poems in Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s much-anticipated new collection To Star the Dark take place in hospitals, in cellars, in Parisian parks and American laundromats, inside our screens and beyond them.
Poems of blood and birdsong, of rain and desire, of aftermath and ambivalence, each spoken by a voice, which – like the starlings – sings, at once, both past and present.
DOIREANN NÍ GHRÍOFA is a bilingual Irish poet and essayist, born in Galway in 1981, living in Cork for many years. She is author of six critically-acclaimed books of poetry, each a deepening exploration of birth, death, desire, and domesticity.
Ní Ghríofa’s first book in English, Clasp (Dedalus Press, 2015) won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Award. A Book of the Year in both The Irish Times and The Irish Independent, Lies (Dedalus Press, 2018), draws on a decade of Ní Ghríofa’s Irish language poems, accompanied by her own translations.
Doireann Ní Ghríofa is also author of the prose bestseller A Ghost in the Throat (Tramp Press, 2020) which finds the eighteenth-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill haunting the life of a contemporary young mother, prompting her to turn detective. Ní Ghríofa’s artistic practice encompasses cross-disciplinary collaborations, fusing poetry with film, dance, music, and visual art, and her work has been commissioned by institutions such as The Poetry Society (Britain), Poetry Ireland, The Embassy of Ireland in Britain, and the Department of Foreign Affairs.
Further awards for Ní Ghríofa’s work include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (USA), a Seamus Heaney Fellowship (Queen’s University), and the Ostana Prize (Italy), among others.
To Star the Dark (Poetry)
By Doireann Ní Ghríofa
70 pp.
2021
Dedalus Press
ISBN 9781910251874 (hardback)
ISBN 9781910251867 (paperback)
€20.00 hardback
€12.50 paperback
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freda kamphuis
boven nietzsche
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Nach dem Cabaret
Ich gehe morgens früh nach Haus.
Die Uhr schlägt fünf, es wird schon hell,
Doch brennt das Licht noch im Hotel.
Das Cabaret ist endlich aus.
In einer Ecke Kinder kauern,
Zum Markte fahren schon die Bauern,
Zur Kirche geht man still und alt.
Vom Turme läuten ernst die Glocken,
Und eine Dirne mit wilden Locken
Irrt noch umher, übernächtig und kalt.
Lieb mich von allen Sünden rein.
Sieh, ich hab manche Nacht gewacht.
Emmy Hennings
(1885 – 1948)
Nach dem Cabaret
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The Seasons
Spring—and her heart is singing
A song full of joyous cheer;
For each brightening day seems bringing
The hope of her life more near.
Summer—her heart is waiting;
Its dream is yet unfulfilled:
But her trust knows no abating,
Though the Spring’s glad song is stilled.
Autumn—her heart is burning
With the fever of restless fears;
And the darkened days returning
Bring her no relief save tears.
Winter—her heart is broken:
The struggles of Hope are o’er;
But the love that was here unspoken
Will be hers where hearts bleed no more.
Evelyn Forest
(Pen name of Anne Pares)
(? – ?)
The Seasons (1862-63)
Illustration: Frederick Eltze (1836–1870)
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