Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... May Day: Poemsby Gretchen Marquette
None Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. no reviews | add a review
Awards
You arrive at my altar with no idea what it means to worship--to adore. You haven't even learned it: ecstasy and suffering make the same face. --from "The Offering" May Day is both a distress call and a celebration of the arrival of spring. In this rich and unusually assured first collection, the poet Gretchen Marquette writes of the losses of a brother gone off to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a great love--losses that have left the world charged with absence and grief. But there is also the wonder of the natural world: the deer at the edge of the forest, the dog reliably coaxing the poet beyond herself and into the city park where by tradition every May Day is pageantry, a festival of surviving the long winter. "What does it mean to be in love?" one poem asks. "As it turns out, / the second best thing that can happen to you / is a broken heart." May Day introduces readers to a new poet of depth and power. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNone
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)811.6Literature English (North America) American poetry 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
where to find the brightest,
most exacting love.
Much of it burns off.
What remains, remains...
We sat under hot light,
in a round room plush with the breath
of strangers. I said, We have
seventy pages left to love one another.
Across his chest burst a sash
of gold chrysanthemum.
One thing I've learned -
you have to let love be practice
for what might happen
elsewhere.
From opening poem "Elsewhere" in this collection that tells a story of loss and absence, and of a wide universe scary in its expansiveness yet offering comforts in small specifics, like in the round yellow shape of butter melted in hot water on the stove. I really enjoyed it.
Weeks after the last time, she bled.
It was startling. There would never be anyone
made from the way he needed her.
- "Lost" ( )