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Public Poetry, Kevin Walzer's meditations on poetry, publishing, business, and other creative pursuits
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Kevin Walzer, a poet, poetry publisher, husband, and father.
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Tue, 18 Apr 2006
Book of the Day: Fullest Tide by Ann Silsbee
One of the first books Lori and I published after going full-tine with our press was The Book of Ga by Ann Silsbee. It was a bittersweet event, because Silsbee passed away suddenly when the book was in the final stages of production. The Book of Ga is a magnificent collection about the author's grandmother, elegantly written and artfully organized. The book was only Silbee's second collection, published very late in her life after decades of writing and publishing in journals. Our sense, and the sense of many of her readers, was that a gifted voice had been silenced far too soon.
We got a sense of just how true that assessment was when Silsbee's husband, Robert, asked us to consider a volume selected from the entire range of her work. It took little time for us to agree to publish the book. The resulting volume, meticulously edited and introduced by the poet Gray Jacobik, is Fullest Tide.
Fullest Tide confirms that Silsbee was a poet of sublime skill. What is most remarkable about her work is its music: Silsbee, who was a musician and composer before turning to poetry in middle age, did not lose her finely tuned ear when she focused on her new art. Silsbee's work is formally broad, ranging from elegantly sculpted traditional forms to free verse that pushes formal boundaries in daring ways. The common thread in her work is its music: the sounds and rhythms of English played together to bring her perceptive observations of nature and humanity to glorious life. Just listen to the way the consonants burst from the lips in this poem:
Waking to SleepI touch your face as if my fingers
were five feathers of an old wise bird
that cannot fly but remembers the lift
of wind beneath wings, the warmth
of down against snow, the breast of waves.
I want to memorize you, learn every mole,
every muscle, every hump of cheek or chin,
the texture of your skin, the landscape
of your bones. Around us, the cacophony
of spring: a cardinal claims his neighborhood,
repeats his proclamation to the world:
Come here, come here, begin again.
Birds echo back and forth. Peonies
spread pink wings. The whole yard’s
ready to go on and on repeating generations.
You and I, love, are not here to stay.
My hands tell you that our lives touch,
that words are stones, won’t bear us into silence.
There has to be a singing in the wing-roots,
the melt of rain into flower, the lift
that lives inside the house of bones,
the tent of skin, a soul’s feathers fluttering.
It's an honor to play a small role in preserving and expanding this gifted poet's legacy.
Book of the Day: Lost and Found by Gwen Hart
Gwen Hart's Lost and Found is a refreshing collection of love poems, at once wry and understated, yet sensual. Hart leavens her potentially weighty subject matter with a spritely wit. Reading Lost and Found, I found myself constantly intrigued by Hart's quick leaps of image and mind, turning from humor to deep insight in a single instance.
For instance, I can't help but admire the sly humor of this poem:
Love Poem Without Flowers
Calcified petals
rubbed from white
down to the blue
or purple quick
glisten in this warm
slash of surf.
Mosaics centered
with thumbnail-thin
buttons of sea
glass stare us right
in the eyes and swear
to be trillium or ox-eye.
A five-pointed
bouncing bet walks
off its stem
into the Atlantic.
My body grown easy
as a just-picked
daisy, I cover you
with my fragrance of salt.
No flowers, indeed! One may describe this entire poem as a flowering, an unfolding. It is entirely characteristic of Hart's technique.