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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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Mon, 05 Nov 2007
Book of the Day: The Body & the Day by Robert McNamara
Robert McNamara's The Body & the Day is a book best described as teeming. McNamara's close, detailed descriptions of the natural world, briskly rendered in dense free verse, reward the reader's patience.
Consider "Dahlias":
Dahlias
They arrive on my desk, a clear demonstrative bunch
prickly and blood-red, passion's messengers
even without your note -- three years ago when
dahlias were in bloom -- making the room stand back,
and the little of everything on the mantel, sweet pea
and freesia, larkspur, bristly mourning bride
rooted in a single thickness of glass stones.
The flowers bell like balls in a Galton board, figures
of chance, the rain stopping, sun glancing off
the gilded slope of a pagoda, its reach released in cloud.
And in the garden, a fat bee humming in the trumpet
of a squash flower fumbles with information like a god.
The strong declarative rhythm of these lines--"a fat bee humming in the trumpet/of a squash flower fumbles"--is emblematic of the propulsive energy of McNamara's work.