By VALERIE DUFF
We are following the hearse,
the body in the hearse steady
as a tree, Not my father
any longer jagged timber,
Afterwards everything whitened
like paper or breath—
The room was suddenly anchored to itself,
the chains stopped groaning.
I knew I could not leave with you.
The sea outside was like the sea
on the map. A sea-god was blowing
into a crosshatched arc of sails.
How do I know
this stark room, the wooden chair,
the antique book in its lap,
the drawers lined with cedar,
the two folded shirts, his and mine,
the map of the Mediterranean World
in a frame, its sea faded turquoise?
Have you come here too?
Is this a place you recognize?
To Nissim Ezekiel
Friends, brothers, sisters, wellwishers
And our esteemed guests from foreign,
Today we welcome to our humble
Abode in Navsari, Gujarat, a precious
Addition to our family,
Our daughter-in-law Emily Curry
Hailing from Lankasire, UK.
On this auspicious day Miss Emily,
Now Mrs, has tied the knot
Of holy matrimony
With our youngest Mahess.
Your parents grow older, perhaps
old. The same conversations,
yellow like the walls,
Book by ROS BARBER
Reviewed by
I’ll be honest: when The Common asked me to review Ros Barber’s new book, The Marlowe Papers, I was leery. Novels-in-verse aren’t really my thing. Reading the back cover blurbs, I became even more skeptical: a novel in iambic pentameter (rhymed and blank verse) from the point of view of the English poet, playwright, Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), whom conspiracy theorists claim was the real author of Shakespeare’s plays? The book claims Marlowe’s death, in a bar-fight before the Church of England could charge him with heresy, was staged to let him escape England. And while in hiding, he ghost-wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays.
What the hell? I expected an overwrought, creepy fan-fiction piece in archaic diction and clumsy meter. After reading a few pages, I realized I owed Ms Barber an apology. This is a damn fine book.
Celebrate the advent of spring with new poems by seven of our spectacular contributors.
Book by STEPHANIE STRICKLAND
Reviewed by
Begin with the cover of Dragon Logic: double Garamond italic ampersands. Inverted they propose elegant dragons against a green hide background. “TWO dragons,” Stephanie Strickland writes in the eponymous poem, “keep a pearl/in the air untouched/if yes then no if no then yes.” Their “dragon logic” insists that the reader consider sets that consist of themselves, a common problem in questions of reflexivity where the self of the self-reference is a human self. This proposition enlarges the idea of the juggling proposed by John Keats’ concept of negative capability—“when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
This month The Common welcomes aboard four poets new to our pages: Maceo J. Whitaker, Claire Eder, Thomas March, and Jonathan Gerhardson. Two of these fine younger poets, Gerhardson and Whitaker, are being published for the first time. At The Common, we’re looking forward to more work by all four of them. Stay tuned.
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