Sixteen great quotes from the poetry I read in May 2016

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). What an excellent feast of poetry to look forward to …

1. ‘Doll’s House’ by Jacob Polley

Be brave. To live is not to fear / despite the scale of what’s at stake. / Two children lie in matchbox cribs. / Next door a couple, stiff as pegs, / are tucked together, rib to rib, / the bedsheets bound around their legs.

Jacob Polley is the author of three acclaimed poetry collections, The BrinkLittle Gods and, most recently, The Havocs, in which ‘Doll’s House’ appears, as well as a Somerset Maugham Award-winning novel, Talk of the Town. He now lives and works in Scotland.

2. ‘Thirst’ by Nikia Leopold

Even in this downpour, roots / know drought, flowers wilt, / the way we extend ourselves, / obscuring our deepest needs, / sleeping without dreams, / growing cover that kills.

Nikia Leopold’s poems have appeared in various magazines, including The American Scholar, Commonweal, Measure, The Southern Review, and Poetry. Her chapbook, Dark Feathers, was published in 2004. Another, Small Pleasures, won the 2012 Blue Light Press Contest, Winter 2014 – 2015. ‘Thirst’ is published in her collection Swan and Jack-knife.

3. ‘Pear Tree in Blossom’ by Fiona Benson

I wonder now how long you’ll keep this up— / not the abstinence exactly but the work— / tree after tree after tree, your orchards blazing, / as if you’d nail down spring; and if you’ll stay / to walk down orchard avenues at dusk / pear in your mouth, your mouth sweet to kiss, / your sticky beard … Christ, I never thought I’d beg.

Fiona Benson’s ‘Pear Tree in Blossom’ is from a sequence of dramatic monologues addressed to Van Gogh that appears in her debut collection of poetry, Bright Travellers. This collection was awarded the 2015 Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection.

4. ‘The Coal Jetty’ by Sinead Morrissey

Twice a day, / whether I’m lucky enough / to catch it or not, // the sea slides out / as far as it can go / and the shore coughs up // its crockery: rocks, mussel banks, beach glass, / the horizontal chimney stacks // of sewer pipes, / crab shells, bike spokes. / As though a floating house // fell out of the clouds / as it passed / the city limits,

Sinead Morrissey is an Irish poet chosen as Belfast’s first poet laureate. ‘The Coal Jetty’ is published in her fifth collection, Parallax, which was awarded the UK’s prestigious T. S. Eliot Prize in January 2014.

5. ‘Wandering Compass’ by Laura Bylenok

Just dusk. It’s always then / when the broken light comes on / again: same pickup we drove / straight through the night / that night, going over ninety / once we crossed the border. / Comes on as if a prowler / triggered an alarm I never rigged. / One time I cut the wires / and went into the house you left. / It was untenanted. Locked. / These things for years. These / years like rooms of things / in perfect order, and there I was, / myself undressing / the bedside table of its secrets. / I touched everything. Pearls. / Pills. They were mine. / The freezer-burn I scraped up / with my nails and melted / on my tongue was mine. / There was nothing to take / and I wanted it. Just dusk.

Laura Bylenok is the author of Warp, winner of the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize, and the hybrid prose chapbook a/0 (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2014). Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Pleiades, North American Review, Guernica, and West Branch, among others. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah.

6. ‘Words’ by Anne Sexton

Yet I am in love with words. / They are doves falling out of the ceiling. / They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap. / They are the trees, the legs of summer, and the sun, its passionate face. // Yet often they fail me. I have so much I want to say, so many stories, images, proverbs, etc. / But the words aren’t good enough, the wrong ones kiss me. / Sometimes I fly like an eagle / but with the wings of a wren. But I try to take care / and be gentle to them. / Words and eggs must be handled with care. / Once broken they are impossible things to repair.

Anne Sexton was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1967. ‘Words’ is from her collection The Awful Rowing Toward God. She died in 1974.

7. ‘Scullers at Dawn’ by Arne Weingart

Like all artists / you start out in the dark // pushing off / alone from the silent docks // of the thousand / black rivers and black lakes // with no special / purpose in mind …/

Arne Weingart is a Chicago-based poet whose work has featured in RHINO, The Georgetown Review, Oberon, Arts & Letters, The Massachusetts Review, Mudfish, Plume, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and other journals. ‘Scullers at Dawn’ is from his collection Levitation for Agnostics.

8. ‘Daily’ by Naomi Shihab Nye

This envelope I address / so the name balances like a cloud / in the center of sky  // This page I type and retype / This table I dust till the scarred wood shines / This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again / like flags we share, a country so close / no one needs to name it  / The days are nouns: touch them / The hands are churches that worship the world

Naomi Shihab Nye gives voice to her experience as an Arab-American through poems about heritage and peace. She has published many collections and received many honours, including four Pushcart Prizes. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2009. ‘Daily’ is from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, which gathers into a single volume her finest poems.

9. ‘Crooked as a Foreign Hat on a Foreign Head’ by Gene Tanta

For me, Amsterdam will always be the city of cheap port and torn ACLs. Fantastic, chirped the herd of wrens from the eves, we were in the mood for chicken skin. Crooked as a foreign hat on a foreign head, I danced with the wine meeting the waters of my mind until the darkness of the city fell on its two knees. All of the animals have gotten loose and no one seems able to represent them.

Gene Tanta is a Romanian-born poet, visual artist, and translator of contemporary Romanian poetry. ‘Crooked as a Foreign Hat on a Foreign Head’ is from What is to be Said: Prose Poems. He is currently editing two anthologies of poetry while teaching literature in the American Studies Program at the University of Bucharest in Romania as a Fulbright Scholar.

10. ‘Early autumn at Bell’s Rapids’ by Shane McCauley

We made our own bed of sorts on hardened / ground, feeling sticks give way before us, / aliens in an organised world of ants, / shed skins of snakes, butt of a crow’s / passing laughter. You said: In spring I will / come here to remember you and the new life / you have flowered in my heart.

Shane McCauley has published six volumes of poetry. In 1993 he was the recipient of a Senior Writers’ Fellowship from the Australia Council. In 2008 he won the Max Harris Award for poetry. ‘Early autumn at Bell’s Rapids’ won first prize in the 2014 Poetry d’Amour Love Poetry Contest, WA Poets Inc.

11. ‘The Light River’ by Hal Colebatch

At the shore a few / people are wading. A few dogs and children run / on nearby grass. Over its little commonwealth of lives /of the hardly interesting, the marginal, the small, / the hardly beautiful, itself part of them all / and happily ignored, where so much thrives / the jetty stands deserted in the sun.

Hal Colebatch was awarded an Australian Centenary Medal in 2003 for services to writing, poetry, the law and political commentary, the only person to receive an award for achievements in this combination of fields. Many of his poems concern Perth and its suburbs, the Swan River and Rottnest Island, as well as travels in Britain, Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere.

12. ‘The Bridge of Birds’ by Jaya Penelope

Then, one night of the year the skies clear / and we reach for each other, one night / which could be any night the air is thick / with a flurry of feathers / wingtip to wingtip we span the spaces / between us, step lightly onto the back / of this impossible metaphor / meet for a moment on / the bridge of birds.

Jaya Penelope is a published poet and storyteller whose first love is the spoken word. She sometimes tells stories with her band of bards the Tealeaf Troubadours. ‘The Bridge of Birds’ was commended in the 2015 Poetry d’Amour Love Poetry Contest, WA Poets Inc., in which her poem ‘I Want to Send You’ was awarded first prize.

13. ‘Spring is still spring (summer)’ by Brooke Emery

and when I look back it’s like those pictures / of divine breath, emanating from a cloud, / whitecaps flicker, the sea ripped open and as suddenly / restored. From this shore there’s distraction for the eye / but no immediate response. Tomorrow // the world won’t be a safer place, / our willingness to wonder and to hurt will be the same.

Brook Emery is the author of several poetry collections, including and dug my fingers in the sand, Misplaced Heart and Uncommon Light—in which ‘Spring is still spring (summer)’ appears. Emery’s awards include the Dennis Butler Memorial Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the Australian Sports Poetry Award, the Arts Queensland Judith Wright Calanthe Award, and the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize.

14. ‘Rhizanthella Gardner’ by Amanda Joy

She is speaking inside herself and each word / burns long enough to clothe his back in what / she can’t contain. // Slow speed of night moving into the unseen / deadline of morning like a tongue into a mouth / stroking language

Amanda Joy is a poet, sculptor, installation artist and songwriter born in the Kimberley region of W.A. She lives, works and gardens in Fremantle. She was awarded the Peter Porter poetry prize in 2016.

15. ‘More’ by Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet

Even the former is frightening: anything / that suffocates. Once near Chang Mai, / under a waterfall: little silver fish // like teaspoons, at first a few and then / a dozen, then the school, the whirlwind, / the river a whisk of tarnish . . . // And the scale tips to shiver, displacement of water for flesh, flashing / and slithering—

Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet is an award-winning American poet. Her second collection, The Greenhouse, was awarded the 2014 Frost Place Chapbook Prize. Her first book, Tulips, Water, Ash, was selected by Jean Valentine for the Morse Poetry Prize. She lives and teaches in California.

16. ‘Mute in the Corner of the Museum of Love’ by Campbell Thomson

You see the earth give birth to the full moon / like a turtle laying an egg on the sand / but when our night ends / the bay swallows it whole in one gulp / leaving a folly of bubbles / inlaid with lacquer marquetry.

Campbell Thomson is a Melbourne writer, artist, and barrister. His poetry has been published in Overland, Cordite, The Australian and The Age.

Note: The last three entries for May were all shortlisted for the Peter Porter Poetry Prize 2016.

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