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

Literature & Fiction

Birkelbach, Alan

Poetry

purple flag

Barbara Crooker's sixth collection of poetry, Small Rain, is an exploration of the wheel of the year, the seasons that roll in a continuous circle and yet move inexorably forward. Here, gorgeous lyric poems praise poppies, mockingbirds, nectarines, mulch and compost, yet loss (stillbirth, cancer, emphysema), with its crow-black wings, is also always present. In poems that narrow in on the particular ("a cardinal twangs his notes of cheer; he has no truck with irony and post- / modernism"), poems that focus on aging and the body ("how many springs are left on my ticket?"), poems that open out into the larger world of politics, war, global climate change, Crooker's work embodies Wendell Berry's words, "Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts," reminding us that sometimes we need to stop in wonder, look at the natural world, which we are close to ruining forever, and let "our mouths say o and o and o."

Small Rain

Crooker, Barbara

Most mornings for the past decade, poet Scott Wiggerman has walked the trails at Austin's Mueller Lake Park, an urban space created on land that once held the city's airport. Awake to the landscape as he walked, Wiggerman stopped from time to time and jotted a word or phrase for a poem that would come later. Leaf and Beak is the product of these walks, of the poet's ever watchful eye, of the discipline he learned mastering the sonnet. Readers are in good hands here. The sonnets-seventy-five of them-flow so smoothly you can forget you're reading a sonnet and just let the images take you in, the rhythms move you forward. The poems of Leaf and Beak are quiet poems, reflective poems, poems that ask you to walk in stillness for moments at a time, to absorb "the hidden in full view," to appreciate "a lone green leaf / that hangs on like a weekend birthday, deaf / to bitter winds." Wiggerman moves from the observed image, letting some details turn him inward while others lead to meditations on his fellow beings, on the world he walks. "What will / tomorrow bring that now cannot be seen?" he asks. "What change, what wonders to discover?"

Leaf and Beak: Sonnets

Wiggerman, Scott

Joe Benevento's Expecting Songbirds, Selected Poems, 1983-2015, provides readers with the opportunity to sample the very best of the writer's work from his four previous books in poetry: Holding On, Willing To Believe, My Puerto Rican Past and Tough Guys Don't Write, along with some of his most recent journal-published poems collected under the heading "Ode to Pears." Oftentimes narrative, and predominantly free verse, Benevento's poems mirror his Italian-American, working class roots in a predominantly black and Latino neighborhood in Queens, but they also look back on his past three decades as professor, editor and writer in the small-town, overwhelmingly white Midwest and the tensions and ironies of having lived the life of an outsider in both settings. Poems delivered with the "plain spoken ease and realism of Frost" (Walter Bargen) and which, "at their best bring to mind the exceptional work of Philip Levine and B.H. Fairchild," (Larry D. Thomas), Expecting Songbirds is an affirmation of Whitman's goal to seek the miraculous in the commonplace. Whether dealing with never quite lost loves, multi-layered lessons gleaned from nature, or a bittersweet but genuine belief in family, Expecting Songbirds stands as testament to over three decades of serious commitment to accessible poetry by a writer who has not underestimated the redeeming value in never taking oneself too seriously.

Expecting Songbirds

Benevento, Joe

With none of the cloying sentimentality of some so-called "nature poets," Hada writes of the natural world as we actually experience it. Few poets since Robert Frost have spoken as clearly and movingly about our attraction to and alienation from the natural world that surrounds us even when we can't be said to be fully in it. In these poems, the speaker is both the man standing on his stoop "looking up at stars" as "tree frogs chortle" and the man who hears the birds more distantly now as he walks tiredly back down the road he has helped to clear and to pave. In the haunting, "Two Deer at Twilight," it is the total otherness of the natural world, its inaccessibility to us that makes the poet love it all the more, as if he were a troubadour and nature his cruel mistress. In "Redbirds Balancing on a Cedar Limb" the poet freely admits that "Their song / is a temporary fix, something / to keep other things away." "I am glad he doesn't trust me," he says, in another poem, of the Roadrunner he has frightened from his back door. Again and again Hada finds poignancy in our strained but indispensable relationship with the natural world. This is the book of poems to tuck into your rucksack before heading into the woods, the book to read on your porch on a clear fall evening as the lights dim around you. This is also the book to carry with you on the bus, train, or taxi into the heart of the busy city, where you just might need it the most. -Benjamin Myers, Oklahoma State Poet Laureate 2015-2016

Persimmon Sunday

Hada, Ken

Amarillo, Texas, to many of those who pass through on their way to the "postcard" mountain scenery of northern New Mexico and Colorado, is the flattest and ugliest place they have ever seen. If, however, they were blessed with the eyes and heightened sensibilities of Chera Hammons, they would be awakened to a world of endless beauty and mystery, a world which captivated "literally" for over a year and "spiritually" for a lifetime none other than the major American artist, Georgia O'Keeffe. Hammons's meticulously crafted poems peel away the layers of the ostensible "otherness" of the natural world, revealing its kernels of mystical profundity to the wide-eyed astonishment of the reader. From grackles to abandoned puppies, tornadoes to tumbleweeds, raptors to horses, bomb manufacturing to sparrows, and human epiphanies to heartbreak, Hammons demonstrates time and time again, with consummate poetic skill, that she "learned how to wring beauty / from anything she could." -Larry D. Thomas, Member, Texas Institute of Letters, 2008 Texas Poet Laureate

The Traveler's Guide to Bomb City

Hammons, Chera

From the prologue through the shaped memories and imaginings of boyhood to the affirmations of the "dignity of work" of ordinary men and women in the heartland, Ken Hada's new collection tells the truth. There is a profound authenticity of voice in these pages, an honesty of character, a wonderful sense of place and time, all underlined by both a lyrical joy and a kind of boisterous sadness for things and people seen and recalled in bars and cafes and the long stretches of land "on the edge/of small town America/in the heart of God's country." Hada sings and celebrates and despairs in the tradition of Steinbeck and Guthrie, and he examines the personal and cultural landscapes where "the ghost/of democracy drifts" as working people try to make lives for themselves and their families, to find that often elusive place where "happiness comes and peace may be found." Writer, seer, observer, and essential character in these poems, "recording impressions, taking note/of my own mortality," Hada tells us with a deeply felt and engaging clarity about those lives, reminding us that they are "more than metaphor" and that the currents of social and economic change affect real people and not just caricatures in the culture wars that divide us. He has "good memories of an Ozark childhood," and knows that too many of those he grew up with have been left behind by those changes. But he also knows that "the same stars hang above us all." That is the fundamental truth in these remarkable poems, genuine and insightful, that at every turn of the page bring us to smiling recognition or to tears. Hada knows that we all share this great land together and that all of us must accept that the commitment to shared purpose and community - across the many horizons at the nation's great core and both eastward and westward to the oceans that frame us - are what "keep an unfair/world from grinding to a halt." This is a brilliant book, a literary and cultural treasure. - Jonas Zdanys

Bring an Extry Mule

In Local Talent, David Wright deepens his poetic engagement with the physical and spiritual terrain of the Midwest. Even when his poems travel far away to Vermont or Italy, Wright's imagination, diction, and poetic eye have been indelibly shaped by the Heartland (its people, communities, fields, roadscapes) through seasons that require "all our talent / to keep our candles and cigarettes lit in the Illinois wind." Formally, the poems range from pantoums and sestinas to elliptical free verse and prose poems. Often sensuous and lyric in nature, Wright's poetry also narrates, converses with other poets, and borrows from musical, artistic, and religious traditions that both vex and soothe. Whether we grieve and mourn our losses, or celebrate fleeting moments of connection to others, this collection offers an honest and imperfect vision of discerning how our varied talents (making art, cultivating community, caring for our bodies, recovering intimacy) root and sustain us in whatever landscape we inhabit if we can "stand, bare-eyed and loving this place" as we struggle to embrace "a nearly open-ended sky."

Local Talent

WRIGHT, DAVID

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