Birkelbach writes of the Texas landscape and its people with conversational ease, making his vivid descriptions shimmer through each poem. He balances the ordinary and the phenomenal, the factual and the suppositional, the temporal and the eternal in poems remarkable for their depth of insight. As Billy Bob Hill writes in his introduction to the volume, Birkelbach can disguise a mosaic of word music in plain sight hidden in conversational English.

Alan Birkelbach: (Tcu Texas Poets Laureate)

Literature & Fiction

Birkelbach, Alan

History & Criticism

TCU Press

What are Smurglets? Why, Smurglets are little creatures that make friends instantly, enjoy dressing up—and love to hide! Where do you find Smurglets? They’re everywhere! Every page of this fun-filled poetry book is bursting with delight for kids and adults alike. Texas Poet Laureate Alan Birkelbach tells you not only where Smurglets come from, but using captivating rhythms, goofy rhymes, and wonderfully made-up words he tells readers from ages 5 to 50 why Ogres Hate Okra, about what happens when Blob Junior Goes to Camp, and the dire consequences of losing your Galoopa! It’s all wild and wacky! Delightfully illustrated by prize-winning artist Susan Halbower, kids will return again and again to read about, and marvel at, Giggleville, Komodos, and Weldon Wing (The Armpit King!), not to mention all the other creatures and crazy situations. Here’s a goofy excerpt from the poem "What’s on the Menu": The wicked witch’s house next door was made of gingerbread. Since people don’t eat sweets as much she used lunch meat instead. What happens next? You’ll have to read to find out! Parents will be reminded of the fun poems they grew up with, the poems they would memorize and then recite again and again. The topics include pizza and dinosaurs and anacondas—plus, wherever you look there’s a Smurglet! While the book might be targeted for 5 to 12 year-olds, everyone who is a child at heart will find something to enjoy. Teachers will discover this is the new book they have been searching for at story-time and for teaching about poetry. It’s playful, entertaining, easy to read, and easy to memorize. Not too hard to understand, not too grown-up, and not too many pages—it’s the perfect book to get kids to read (and make them giggle.) Smurglets are Everywhere! And soon you’ll see why!

Smurglets Are Everywhere

Children's Books

Animals

Poets Karla K. Morton and Alan Birkelbach began this journey to celebrate our national parks' one hundredth anniversary, but for these two poets the sojourns quickly became something greater than that. In their words, "As humans we have this tendency to look at a piece of land and see real estate. [But] when concrete covers all our natural spaces, not only do we lose earth's creatures, we also lose the great teacher of our souls. You cannot sit beneath trees taller than the Statue of Liberty, or gaze upon vistas untouched since their creation, without feeling the awe and wonder of what the natural world has to offer. You cannot experience such beauty without being wholly changed. Our great-great-great-grandchildren deserve these untouched gifts." This journey, illustrated with gorgeous color photos of all of America's grand national parks, is a feast for the eyes and heart. In the end, it is a plea for us to save these wonders for all future generations.

The National Parks: A Century of Grace

Arts & Photography

Morton, Karla K.

Photography & Video

Alan Birkelbach's tenth book of poetry, Meridienne Verte, is an existential romp through terrain that seems familiar at first - but changes before our very eyes. With each accessible poem, balancing wisdom with irreverence, Birkelbach invites readers in with simple and common language - and then leaves them in an environment not unlike the scientific explorers in his poem "A Little Conversation about Geometers" who have suddenly found themselves in a different place in the center of the earth, all rules of gravity and survival changed. It is their world, yes, but it isn't the same anymore - because someone asked a question that altered everything: "What use was there in measuring the stars...?" In so many of the poems, "When Those Choose to Talk" or "Atlas On His Day Off", for example, Reality (with a capital R) is so far away - but it isn't really. The poems are full of the mysterious minutiae of the reality we all know, transported to mythical and almost unbelievable settings. Whether it is the transient nature of a camisole failing off an invisible shoulder, or the misericordia in a church most of us will never visit, the implicit value of the inherent, far-off, and short-term treasure, and measure, is promoted to be one of hope and exuberance. Life may be short. But based on Birkelbach's poems it is well worth living.

Meridienne Verte

Poetry

purple flag

No Boundaries

Eakin Press

This is the most complete selection of work by 2005 Texas State Poet Laureate Alan Birkelbach ever put in one volume. It brings together selections that represent his more recognizable pieces, work that has only been available in journals, work that has only been available in books that are out of print or unavailable, plus a generous selection of new work. In Case of Poetry Reading Break Glass It is almost certain this is a scenario that will never happen: if someone spontaneously combusts while reading something by Bukowski then perhaps they should be allowed to burn. Then let’s all go for the axe. Of course, the sign there would read, “In case of fire break glass,” and inside the tiny little alcove, the shelf barely big enough to hold an ancient dwarf mummy, would be a poetry book which most of us, I fear, would not know how to use. We would stare blankly at it for several seconds, wondering what possible good it could do us, how it might yet save our lives.

Waking the Bones: New and Selected Works

Texas Review Press

Rogue Waves examines those moments that are like their namesake, events that occur unexpectedly, that cannot possibly be real, that have disproportionate impact, and just as quickly are over. This book is all about “ . . . the keystone that dislodges, the chain that breaks . . . .” The implicit question is always, “What happens when our pathway changes all of a sudden?” We find new ways to help us cope, accepting the paradox of a new reality, sometimes only checking to see what parts still work and then moving forward. Rogue Waves is about the abrupt shifts in our paradigms and perspectives and balance. 
“Alan Birkelbach's thoughts and images, set in Wallace Stevens-like word play, spill so fast the reader must clutch or miss the depths and read again, or maybe yet again. But we're included. Whether it's Persephone in bunny slippers pulling Pluto out of bed, or little-boy Alexander the Great posing heroically before a Sears camera, he invites figures from myth, history, the streets he walks daily, to sit down with him and us at breakfast. Lurking beneath the scattered surfaces of seemingly random observations are moments when we find our canoe on the bottom, our self on the wrong street, rocks falling on us from Krakatoa's explosion, or stones from a pyramid we were stacking the wrong way.”-Frances Neidhardt

Rogue Waves

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Books by Birkelbach, Alan