Fire in the Pasture: 21st Century Mormon Poets
. . . the bounty of [this] anthology reminded me of Christ’s generosity in feeding the five thousand. Christ took real substances—a little bread, two small fish—and he created from them . . . food that nourished the people and made it possible for them to return to their lives both physically and spiritually renewed. Poets take matter (language, emotion, thought, experience) and make of that matter a new creation, a work of art that did not exist before the poet organized it, a work that has the potential (each poet hopes) to nourish—to make readers see what they did not see before, to offer insight, to create empathy, to provoke thought, or to express beauty, soundness, depth. To offer abundance in place of scarcity.
–Susan Elizabeth Howe
Random Posts
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Claire Åkebrand: October is Plush, but Only Fleetingly So
12 April 2012 2:14 PM | No CommentsAnthology Poet Highlight 42/82: Claire Åkebrand, “October Plush” (scroll down) Like the violet at its center, the texture of Claire’s “October Plush” is lush, but only fleetingly so. The poet runs her words like fingers over the flower’s petals, pausing...
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“How We are Saved” in/by Neil Aitken’s Lost Country of Sight
20 October 2011 9:06 AM | No CommentsAnthology Poet Highlight 4/82: Neil Aitken, The Lost Country of Sight Neil’s first collection begins with a poem—“In the Long Dream of Exile”—that marks the solitary nature of the poet’s vocation. Pointing to this call to wander rhetorical landscapes in...
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A Walk through “My True Country” with Susan Elizabeth Howe
19 October 2011 8:09 PM | No CommentsAnthology 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...
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The Deep-throated Ache of Marilyn Bushman Carlton’s “Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Major“
21 October 2011 2:36 PM | No CommentsAnthology Poet Highlight 5/82: Marilyn Bushman-Carlton, “Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Major“ (Scroll down) 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...
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But We are No Eden: Emily Stanfill’s “Then I Became Eve”
10 November 2011 10:26 AM | No CommentsPoet Highlight: Emily Stanfill, “Then I Became Eve“ What strikes me most about the poem, first, is the way the poet “verbs” the adjective innocent, using it not to describe her Eve—as in, “I am/was innocent/an innocent person”—but as a...
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Jonathon Penny Archive
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Jonathon Penny’s “Confession, after battle”: A Soldier’s Litany
Posted on November 17, 2011 | No CommentsAnthology Poet Highlight 29/82: Jonathon Penny, “Confession, after battle“ At first glance, “Confession” seems a simplistic poem: the poet repeats the same structure for four, essentially five, stanzas, changing only a word per stanzaic turn. The structure is thus something...
