I will again be teaching creative writing at Germanna in the Spirng 2020 semester

My poem "Mermaids" is now published on The Voices Project and available to read.

My poem "Mermaids" is now published on The Voices Project and available to read.

Review: The Death Notebooks

The Death Notebooks by Anne Sexton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While I have found the Confessional School of poetry to be generally too self-indulgent, Anne Sexton's "The Death Notebooks" dances a fine line between art and autobiography to crate an experience for the reader that reveals and delights. When confessional poetry fails, I think, it is too specific to the individual, losing gift of great art at speaking tot he universal human experience. Sexton's work in this volume succeeds here.

Yet waiting to die we are the same thing.

Her struggles with life and faith permeate this collection, remaining unresolved by avoiding pat answers. The old faith seems dried out:

You have to polish up the stars
with Bab-o and find a new God
as the earth empties out
into the gnarled hands of the old redeemer.

But the Christian dream remains alive in its democracy:

We are put there beside the three thieves
for the lowest of us all
deserve to smile in eternity
like a watermelon.

Sexton writes well, passionately, honestly, using her words in her futile struggle against depression that came early abuse and life's daily insults. Her words may still redeem us. That's what she hopes for as she writes:

For I am placing fist over fist on rock and plunging into the altitude of words. The silence of words.

This collection is for all of us who live along the rock edge of death, smiling like watermelons.



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Manzano Mountain Review will publish 2 of my poems

Manzano Mountain Review (a literary journal in New Mexico) will publish 2 of my poems in their next issue.

Review: Walking Toward the Sun

Walking Toward the Sun by Edward Weismiller
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What a wonderful surprise, wonderful collection. I must admit my ignorance-I had never heard of Edwar Weismiller, more to my loss. There are so many good poets wriiting. Weismiller died in 2010 and this seems to be his last pubished collection with only 2 others long out of print. Ted Kooser thught so highly of him and listed this poem as exemplery:

Sea Horse

You might think it would leap the waves
in a white fire of foam
racing, eyes mad with what might
be delight:

a runaway, or loosed from a god’s
team, galloping in its vast
pasture. But this one
was the size of a brooch, thin, and red-gold, and still.

The children had sent for it
from the Atlantic.
It arrived by air in a pouch of seawater containing
all it needed to sustain life as it crossed the continent.

Following instructions
we made it a small, nourishing ocean
in which it anchored itself upright
to a strand of seaweed, and, staring jewel-eyed

at nothing, slowly faded white
and died.

Such poignancy without bathos, craft without pretension, simple language without prosaism.

I wish I had met Weismiller's poetry before. I wish he had written more. I heartily recommend this collection.

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