Volume 105, Number 3/4
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Today a muddy road / filled with leaves, tomorrow / the stiffening earth and a footprint / glazed with ice. —John Haines Cover Caption: Ice skaters on Mirror Lake in Yosemite, 1911. Courtesy of the Library Of Congress, Washington, DC. |
Editors’ Page
When the skaters in our cover photo posed for the camera a century ago, winter was outside them. Alive and capable, arrayed against the backdrop of Yosemite’s snowy peaks, which of them was picturing his or her own diminishment, his or her own demise? Which could have imagined a future (our moment) in which winter itself would change—would be changed—the shrinking ice-fields just another measure of our staggering carelessness?
Poets have always seen the seasons as metaphors for personal cycles of growth and decline, a mirror for experience. In his notebooks, Samuel Coleridge wrote: “In looking at objects of Nature…I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking for, a symbolical language for something within me that already and for ever exists.” Spring, summer, autumn, winter. Birth, growth, maturity, decay.
A number of poems in this issue evoke the turning of the year in distinctive ways. Elizabeth Oness’s “Winter Solstice”–a poem about love and morality–makes this deceptively simple claim: “It’s hard to imagine the earth / tipped away from the great light….” In “Thoreau’s Garden,” Todd Davis contemplates the ancient drama of cultivation, as Henry David fetches water for “potatoes and cabbages, / for scallions pushing their fingers // from winter’s grave.” Joseph Ross’s stark, affecting “First and Last” pivots on the role reversal between mother and child in the span of a human lifetime, that most familiar of cycles, as the poet realizes the last thing his mother hears is: “My voice, from outside her / this time, at the level of her heart.”
And in this issue, we also feature the poems of native Alaskan dg nanouk okpik, whom D. Nurkse brings to our pages in “Poets Introducing Poets.” Nowhere are the effects of climate change more palpable than in the far North. Ms. okpik’s ritualistic narratives–steeped in Inuit folklore and sobered by the rudimentary predicaments of survival–conjure up a way of life as miraculous and endangered as the Arctic itself. In “Oil is a People,” she writes: “I see the pipeline cracking, the Haul road / paved. I fall asleep as you are dancing / with the dead….”
Is this a vision? A warning? The eerie lines do what poetry does best: unsettle us with the truth–and maybe move us toward it.
Poetry
Todd Davis Thoreau Hears the Last Warbler at the End of September
Joan I. Siegel In Late November
Ed Ochester Fall
Amanda Newell November
Doris Ferleger What I Mean by Beauty
Gerard Grealish The Twinge
Elizabeth Oness Winter Solstice
Doug Ramspeck Snow Falling
Susan Deer Cloud Sunday Night Snow
Phillip Sterling Every Next Train
Marcela Sulak The Love-Life of Objects
Susan L. Lin What Happens Behind Boarded Windows
Susan L. Lin House of Cards EP
Janice Miller Potter The Past, the Past
Joseph Ross First and Last
Tara M. Taylor Dead Ringer
David McAleavey Telepathy
Josh Kalscheur Fire
Sharon L. Charde this fire
Stacie Leatherman Phillumenist
Ken Poyner The Magician
Dallas Crow The Wonderland Blues
Anya Silver Chasing a Grasshopper at the Indian Mounds
Lee Rossi Paseo Miramar
Elizabeth Oness Train of Thought
Cordell Caudron Praying Mantis
Kate Hanson Foster Dear Lowell
Gary Fincke Light and Shadow
Michael Fulop The Mysterious Future
Carol Tufts Blue Numbers
Marcela Sulak Allison took the Facebook quiz, “What Dictator are You?” & the result was: Mussolini
James Lautermilch Untitled
Jared Harel Translation
Janet McNally Eve in Manhattan
Jeff Hardin In the Park
Brian Swann The Flock
Virginia Konchan John Keats
Mark Gordon Each Time You Breathe I Hear the Sigh of a Hundred-Year-Old Book
Lynne Sharon Schwartz The Key
Daniel Nathan Terry For All of Its Windows
Kurt Steinwand Looks Like I’m Flying
Chuck Tripi Landing in Weather
Donald Berger You Should See
Andrea O’Brien Walls/Windows
Daniel Becker Standing in Line at the Pet Forum
Naton Leslie You Have the Right to a Plaster Cast
Dian Duchin Reed Growing Up on Thirty-First Street
K.B. Kincer In My Neighborhood
Christine Tierney 16 Things You Should Know About the Fort
Lucinda Roy Primary Circles
Katherine J. Williams Before the First Knife
Todd Davis Thoreau’s Garden
Arthur Vogelsang The Canon and the Personal Canon
Travis Mossotti Rain
Greg McBride Woman
Emily M. Green The Problem with the Only Tailor in Town Being Your Ex
Anya Silver Running an Errand for the National Geographic Society Library, 1992
Margaret Hasse And All Points West
Kay Comini New Year’s Day Bridge
James Pollock Lullaby
Virgil Suárez So Blue
Nancy Morejón A Cousin translated by David Frye
Josh Kalscheur Vista
Mary Morris Hanuman
Greg McBride Laps
Brent Schaeffer An Unfinished Memorial
Poets Introducing Poets
Dennis Nurkse introduces dg nanouk okpik
An Ice Shelter
The Flying Snow-Knife
The Sun, the Moon, and the Dead Man
His Cell-Block on the Chena River
Oil is a People
Cockroach Robot
Quonsot Hut
Old Squaw Duck
I Am Prey
Amulet-for-the-Spirits-Around-the-Bend
Essay
“Guarding Master’s Head: Reflections on My Emily Dickinson” by Maryhelen Snyder.
Reviews
Ravi Shankar reviews The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems by Agha Shahid Ali
Judith Harris reviews Hand of the Wind by Geraldine Connolly
Nan Fry reviews Then, Something by Patricia Fargnoli and Never-Ending Birds by David Baker
Merrill Leffler reviews Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld