Tag Archives: animals

In the Beginning, the End: Some Initial Thoughts on Susan Elizabeth Howe’s Salt

This past Saturday, my review copy of Susan Elizabeth Howe‘s new book, Salt, arrived. I’ll be reviewing it for A Motley Vision and expect to have my essay completed and posted sometime in the next month or two, but in the meantime I wanted to post my initial response to the collection. While I haven’t yet read beyond the first… Read more »

To Speak the Language of Animals: Marilyn Nielson’s “Sheep”

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Anthology Poet Highlight 38/82: Marilyn Nielson, “Sheep” [audio:http://fireinthepasture.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/tumblr_lx79b4k4DH1qldxkx.mp3](Marilyn’s reading of “Sheep”) To speak for those who otherwise can’t, to give the unvoiced a voice, the other languaged means by which to understand and be understood by others: these seem to be fundamental functions of the gospel of Christ, at the center of which rests the atonement. In this eternally-in-force act… Read more »

“This Was When”: Matthew James Babcock’s “Moose Remembered”

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"Moose in the Neighbor's Yard"

Anthology Poet Highlight 33/82: Matthew James Babcock, “Moose Remembered” (scroll down) [audio: http://www.terrain.org/poetry/25/mp3/Babcock_MooseRemembered_Terrain.org.mp3] (Matthew’s reading of “Moose Remembered” [from Terrain.org]) This poem features a moose, but it’s about memory: the redemption of past experience. “This was when,” the poet begins, speaking to his wife, I presume, about a Saturday morning earlier in their marriage when he, as a young husband… Read more »

The Urge and Urge and Urge of Danny Nelson’s “Creation”

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Anthology Poet Highlight 28/82: Danny Nelson, “Creation” Danny’s “Creation” revises the Old Testament’s opening text. As such, it delves deeply into the “procreant urge of creation,” a phrase straight out of Whitman. Indeed, in Danny’s poem, as in Whitman and, I would argue, most poetry, I find this “Urge and urge and urge, / Always the procreant urge of the… Read more »

Language—and Beyond Language: Lisa Bickmore’s “Dog Aria”

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Anthology Poet Highlight 23/82: Lisa Bickmore, “Dog Aria” Lisa’s poem is about a dog. And not about a dog. On the surface the poet narrates her dachsund’s relationship with water and with song, showing the canine “baying adagio,” swimming “among the staves”—the movements of the sprinklers, the dishwasher, the washing machine—as the hush of water grows thick in his ears… Read more »

“A Delicious Lapping”: Lance Larsen’s In All Their Animal Brilliance

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Anthology Poet Highlight 15/82: Lance Larsen, In All Their Animal Brilliance American poet Lola Haskins blurbed about Lance’s second collection that “the book stands out” in the field of contemporary American poetry for at least two reasons: first, because “it travels—from a talisman in the first poem to a vineyard in the last, in which metaphors of growth and renewal… Read more »

A Walk through “My True Country” with Susan Elizabeth Howe

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Anthology Poet Highlight 3/82: Susan Elizabeth Howe, “My True Country” Susan is one of Mormon culture’s more prominent poets. She’s published in some of the nation’s prestigious journals and has served as the poetry editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and Literature and Belief. Her Poetry Foundation bio note speaks to her influences and something of her philosophy:… Read more »