Our Poetry Editor, Irene Willis, is on vacation and will be back in June.
Category: Poetry Monday
Poetry Monday: April 4, 2022
“Oh, to be in England, now that April’s there”
Who said that? If we really can’t remember, we can Google it, as we do almost everything nowadays. I just did, and it was Robert Browning.
Good morning everyone. Of course we’d love to be where cowslips and other lovely flowers are blooming, but they’re also a-bloom in California and anywhere in the world where we don’t have to swallow antihistamines for protection against loveliness.
“April, April, weep thy girlish laughter
Then a morning after
Weep thy girlish tears”
If you’ve heard of William Watson, you now have, because he’s the one who said that. Continue reading Poetry Monday: April 4, 2022
Poetry Monday: March 7, 2022
David Giannini
Good morning, everyone! We last featured David Giannini in 2011, but are welcoming him again now for a very special reason: the gorgeousness of his new book. Yes, the word is accurate, and you’ll soon learn why.
Meanwhile, I do hope you, dear readers, have survived all our recent holidays in the midst of a year like few we have ever known and now come to us fully vaccinated, boosted and masked if you’re not home alone.
“The Dawn of Nothing Important” (Dos Madres Press, 2022) is so beautiful that I had to stand it up to admire it before beginning to read the poems, which are fully deserving also of anyone’s admiration. It now takes pride of place on my shelves, as it may on yours, unless you choose to display it on a coffee table for visitors to pick up and admire.
Award-winning poet David Giannini has been giving us wonderful poems for many years. But that’s not all he’s done. He has been a gravedigger, a beekeeper, a professor at Williams College, the University of Massachusetts and Berkshire Community College, having begun his teaching career with Continue reading Poetry Monday: March 7, 2022
Poetry Monday December 2021
Poetry Monday October 2021
POETRY MONDAY: September 6, 2021
Good morning, Everyone,
Happy Post-Labor Day!
I wish I could mandate that you must be vaccinated and masked to read this column, but since I can’t I can only hope that those of you who can will be if you plan to venture outside once again –and especially, inside.
In times like these, one of the best, most soul-healing things we can do is read poetry.
Our poet today is one I have wanted to introduce for some time. Here she is: 
Mihaela Moscaliuc
This lovely poet learned English in school in Romania, from a teacher who lent them books in English such as “Catch-22,” “Lord of the Flies” and “The Catcher in the Rye.”
Amazingly, he also had his students listen to records with The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen and Leonard Cohen – just like so many American teenagers.
Mihaela came to the U.S. when she was twenty-four to pursue graduate studies and since then has published a number of successful poetry collections. Among them are Cemetery Ink (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) and Father Dirt (Alice James Books, 2010). She was the translator of Liliana Ursu’s Clay and Star (Etruscan Press, 2014) and Carmelia Leonte’s The Hiss of the Viper (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2014) and is the editor of Insane Devotion: On the Writings of Gerald Stern (Trinity University Press, 2016). With her husband, the well-known poet Michael Waters, she co- Continue reading POETRY MONDAY: September 6, 2021
POETRY MONDAY: August 2, 2021
Good morning, everyone. It’s not often that I introduce a brand-new poet to you in this column; in fact, this may be the very first time.
Felicity Sheehy’s name was sent to me by one of her former teachers, who offered high praise, so I took a look for myself and found it to be well-deserved. Her chapbook (and only book so far), “Losing the Farm,” published this year, won the Munster Literature Centre’s international chapbook prize. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, The Yale Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Narrative, Blackbird, Shenandoah, The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review The Common, Literary Matters, and elsewhere. A distinguished publication record indeed for one so young (full disclosure: I didn’t ask her age).
Her work has won an Academy of American Poets Prize the Jane Martin Prize, and scholarships to Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Community of Writers. Continue reading POETRY MONDAY: August 2, 2021