Tag Archives: family

“The Points at which My Loves Fell from Me”: Philip White’s The Clearing

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Anthology Poet Highlight 22/82: Philip White, The Clearing In this book dedicated to his late father, mother, and wife, Philip invites us to feel our way around in the soul-space excavated by love and life, loss and death. Framed, then, as elegiac meditations on the loss of persons beloved, the poet lingers on these moments of departure—what the speaker in… Read more »

Sally Stratford’s “Inheritance”: What Holds Us Together

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Anthology Poet Highlight 17/82: Sally Stratford, “Inheritance“ The most striking thing to me about this poem are the images that suggest being clothed/covered/dressed in one’s legacy; or, in the poet’s words, that imply “wear[ing a] name” (line 1) that’s been passed between generations. There’s the “two carat diamond / which, like a heavy rock of salt, / falls to the… Read more »

Warren Hatch’s Mapping the Bones of the World: “An Economy of Grace”

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Anthology Poet Highlight 13/82: Warren (Scott) Hatch, Mapping the Bones of the World Although it might seem contradictory to suggest that Mapping the Bones of the World, a collection of long narrative poems, is economical—as if the poet had composed from a frugal rhetorical budget, determined to compress experience into as tight a linguistic vessel as he could craft in… Read more »

The Blessing and Curse of Michael R. Collings’ “Legacy”

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Anthology Poet Highlight 8/82: Michael R. Collings, “Legacy“ (My reading of Michael’s poem.) Michael’s longish poem, “Legacy,” breaches the subject of family in a way that neither sentimentalizes the good nor that glosses over the difficult. This is apparent in the first lines in which the poet says, “By all accounts my great-great-great / was / a thorough-going bastard /… Read more »

The Deep-throated Ache of Marilyn Bushman Carlton’s “Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Major“

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Anthology Poet Highlight 5/82: Marilyn Bushman-Carlton, “Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Major“ (Here’s a link to my reading of Marilyn’s poem.) Music, as poetry, has power to bind us through and with the body’s rhythms. Marilyn Bushman-Carlton provides a case in point with “Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Major,” a fairly short poem that shows the… Read more »