Here’s my project. I read a poem a day, imbibe its rhythms and use this as an inspiration for my own writing. Because it’s 2016, I’ll choose 16 quotes from 16 of these poems to feature on A Bigger Brighter World so you’ll get to enjoy a taste of them too. I may not manage it every month. But, if I do, that will equal 16 poems a month for 12 months (meaning 192 poems by the end of the year). I’m over half way through but there are still five months more of this excellent feast of poetry to look forward to …

1. ‘City of Low Houses’ by Circe Maia (translated from the Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval)

The light lingers on corners / catches on a balcony, then reluctantly lets go. / The sky touches everything / and enters everywhere. // What shall we do with so much /
blue, so close?

Circe Maia is a Uruguayan poet, essayist, translator, and teacher of philosophy. She is the author of eleven poetry collections. ‘City of Low Houses’ is published in The Invisible Bridge / El puente invisible: Selected Poems of Circe Maia.

2. ‘At River Bend’ by Frances Olive

With my thought I snatch / the fishtail – / passing future. // Is this a path? / Or is it my eyes / who are tame? // When will my memories / learn non-attachment? // One month passes / more slowly than the moon. // II / Slipping on the lazy morning / the sun wheel gifts me / her spare hour. // Tomorrow is clean as stripped bark; / still, today is not a tree. // Green grass wears / a blue face.

Frances Olive’s writing has been recognised in various literary competitions, including the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the Alan Marshall Short Story Award and the Varuna Fellowship program. Frances completed her doctoral studies in philosophy at the University of Sydney. ‘At River Bend’ was shortlisted for The Newcastle Poetry Prize.

3. ‘Variations to the Accompaniment of a Cloud’ by W. S. Merwin

Because I do not hope to see again / this spring morning with its cloud of light / that wakes the blackbird in the trees downhill / from the house I came to long ago / when I was young and the silence / was a summer day / that first summer that I would see / from these windows / I came to see / the plum trees flowering on the slope below / the snow swirling outside the kitchen / I will not see this morning fill / with light again along the green field / under the walnut trees those silent ancients / I reach out to it with words / it never hears

W. S. Merwin, recipient of the Pulitzer, Bollingen, Tanning, and Lenore Marshall Poetry prizes, has published over 20 books of poetry and nearly 20 books of translations. The Collected Poems of W. S. Merwin, edited by J. D. McClatchy, recently appeared as a two-volume set from The Library of America. ‘Variations to the Accompaniment of a Cloud’ was published in The Yale Review in January 2016.

4.  ‘The Starry Night’ by Anne Sexton

The town does not exist / except where one black-haired tree slips / up like a drowned woman into the hot sky. / The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars. / Oh starry starry night! This is how / I want to die.

Anne Sexton was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1967. This poem was inspired by Vincent Van Gogh’s painting ‘Starry Night’. It begins with a quote from a letter written by Van Gogh that says that, despite himself, he has a deep, ‘terrible’ need for religion, and that it is when he feels this need that he goes out and paints the stars. The poem was published in Sexton’s collection The Starry Night in 1961.

5. ‘Ward at Night’ by Rebecca Goss

the nurses’ station beams help from its hub – // women who mark my baby’s decreasing / growth, report to a cluster of registrars. // Eventually, she dozes. A nurse tacks a plaster / to her toe, restarts the monitor, to follow // this small satellite, failing in my arms.

Rebecca Goss has an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff University. Her first full-length collection, The Anatomy of Structures, was published in 2010 by Flambard Press. ‘Ward at Night’ is published in Her Birth, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection and for the 2015 Warwick Prize for Writing.

6. ‘A Poem Not Written by Yannis Ritsos on the Day of My Birth’ (7/25/67) by Christopher Bakken

Some meaning he found in three black plums, / a thimble of cold ouzo sipped at noon, / a blank canvas of stone in his pocket. // Confined by my white blanket, / I see none of this, of course, / since the lamps of my parents’ house are off, / the shades drawn tight against midsummer, / the edicts of each shadow held at bay.

Christopher Bakken is department chair and Frederick F. Seeley Professor of English at Allegheny College. He is the author of three poetry collections including Eternity & Oranges in which ‘A Poem Not Written by Yannis Ritsos on the Day of My Birth’ appears. In 1967 Ritsos was arrested and forbidden to publish in Greece under the military dictatorship of Colonel Yiorgos Papadopoulos.

7. ‘Dear Death’ by David Hernandez

It works this way: I’m running the knife / across the cutting board, the cilantro /  breaks into confetti, I remember my mother / scattering the herb over a Chilean dish, then / her voice on Monday, ‘numbness in my leg,’ / ‘congestive heart failure,’ and it fails, / my mind fast-forwards to when it fails, / I can’t help it, you grip her IV’d hand, pull her / over, and it is done, her silence begins / blowing through in waves, icing the room— /

David Hernandez’s most recent book of poetry, Hoodwinked, won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. His other books include Always Danger and A House Waiting for Music. Hernandez teaches creative writing at California State University, Long Beach. ‘Dear Death’ is from Dear, Sincerely, University of Pittsburgh Press.

8. ‘Tourniquet’ by Tara Skurtu

5. Name // Last night it was different. I was in a helicopter, / strapped next to someone I didn’t know enough to love. // We were helicoptering together one moment, / then spiralling into a loose funnel, about to crash. // We crashed. I didn’t know whether or not I was dead, / so I walked to your house to see if you could see me. // You could, but you called me by a different name.

Tara Skurtu teaches incarcerated college students through Boston University’s Prison Education Program. She is the recipient of two Academy of American Poets Prizes and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship. ‘Tourniquet’ was published in the Kenyon Review in March/April.

9. ‘Heart Sutra’ by Kyeren Regehr

waiting on the other shore, beyond the ceremony. Our best man sobs, / clutches the podium as he reads, his comb-over strands // lifting in the breeze. Our vows hail the elusive sound / of the heart—in Sanskrit anahata means // unstruck, unharmed. They say a roomful of people in heart mediation / create a silent field that others might fall into. My daughter scatters petals on our / feet— // my love sinks to one knee, asks my daughter to be his daughter. / If we could peel back the facade of the world, all we’d see is light.

Kyeren Regehr’s poetry has been published in journals and anthologies in Canada, Australia and America. She has twice received a grant from Canada Council for the Arts. She is seeking a publisher for her manuscript, Cult Life. Regehr lives in Victoria, BC, Canada.

10. Four a.m. by Doris Brett

Is when you wake / into that strange country, / realising only now / how it has been with you / all of the time, truly / sailing below you, quietly, / the way a ship slides / over its own reflection. And how all of the days / have been counted backwards / from that place / where moving away / is only moving towards them.

Doris Brett is a clinical psychologist as well as a multi-award winning author and poet. She has been published in America, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland and Russia and awarded numerous literary awards for her poetry. ‘Four a.m.’ is from In the Constellation of the Crab, a collection of poems that arose out of her experience with ovarian cancer.

11. ‘Why, In the Restaurant, Our Bodies Were Humming’ by Susan R. Williamson

Not for the usual reasons, but for those too: / counterpoint of pheromone, ritual frictions, // the near imperceptible brush of your finger / against mine as the bread was passed from // one to the other at the table, and then, / all I could see were centrepiece flowers, // petals and fronds swirling in a candlelight blur. / I couldn’t even flinch when a sparkle of lemon // squeezed over a plate reached my wrist, / its fragrance of sunlight suggesting other fruit, //

Susan R. Williamson lives in Boca Raton, Florida, where she is Director of The Palm Beach Poetry Festival. ‘Why, In the Restaurant, Our Bodies Were Humming’ is published in her collection Burning After Dark. Williamson’s poems have also appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Paterson Literary Review, Poetry East, Smartish Pace and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others.

12. ‘Not So Wild’ by Omar Sakr

I dream though / of watching you drift into riotous clouds / and feel again the joy of those formless days. / Only now I am unpicking this quiver / of questions, a feathered wilderness. / You came down from the sky changed / somehow older & wiser immeasurably / distant—whole worlds lay between / our almost-touching fingertips / as we walked home.

Omar Sakr is an Arab-Australian poet whose work has featured in Meanjin, Overland, Cordite, Mascara Literary Review and Tincture Journal, among others. He was runner-up for the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted in the 2015 ACU Poetry Prize. ‘Not So Wild’ was published in Overland Issue 222 in 2016.

13. ‘Night in Arizona’ by Sarah Howe

The last of the sheet I shuffle off an ankle – / a sound like the spilling of sand / from shovel and the night air blurs // for a second with its footfall. / Our entwined shape a word in the dark. / On my forehead and cheek // each flourishing / charge of your breathing / is a moment’s reprieve. Heat // in this place goes deeper than / sleep.

Sarah Howe is a Hong Kong-born British poet, academic and editor. ‘Night in Arizona’ appears in Loop of Jade, her first collection, which was awarded the TS Eliot poetry prize in 2015. Judges said she is a new voice who ‘will change British poetry’. Loop of Jade was also awarded The Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award, and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

14. ‘The Shave’ by W.N. Herbert

Small panics soften as the lathering brush / approaches with its cool aquatic kiss, / a giant otter on the Tyne’s soft bank. / You find there is still more to be relaxed, / vertebra by intercostal cog, your shoes / loll outwards as the blade – an eyebrow of steel, / the moon’s regard – begins, as wielded by / this nun-battered Dublin Geordie lass who lifts / your jowls gently in the snow-lit morning / and strums upon the fretboard of your throat.

W. N. Herbert is a leading figure in the energetic renewal of Scottish poetry carried out by poets born between 1955 and 1965, a group which includes Carol Ann Duffy, John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson and Robert Crawford. Herbert is a great collaborator and writes partly in Scots believing: ‘Scots is a language capable of doing more than English, capable of doing something different from English that criticises and, ultimately, extends English.’

15. ‘Visitation on Myrtle Street’ by David Malouf

When I woke again the scent had faded. What / had not was the change I felt // on my skin, on my nerves. / Later I worked for an hour or two / at my desk, struggling with angels // of another sort, who leave / no trace I would call a scent. Of musk or sweat, / or pine. Only pen-strokes on a page // they have changed with their lingering, when they deign / to linger. Or a dazzling / blankness when they do not.

David Malouf is an internationally acclaimed author and poet. In March 2016 he received an Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature, acknowledging his outstanding contribution to Australian literature. ‘Visitation on Myrtle Street’ was ABR’s poem of the week, published on April 15.

16. ‘Soundtracks’ by Hazel Smith

Music is about memory, but enduring is about forgetting. // They’d cut off your hair but you could summon up the tresses, tap them into a poem. // At first the boots felt like a threat, a reminder of surveillance. They came too close, the wall was a spineless membrane. But then you started to need, even desire, them. Punctuation of the night, grammar of dismantled senses. // The feet become a face. A house burns into light. A careless guess becomes a premonition.

Hazel Smith is a research professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. She is also a poet, performer and new media artist. She has published three volumes of poetry, three CDs of performance work and numerous multimedia collaborations. ‘Soundtracks’ appears in her poetry collection Word Migrants, published in 2016.