I didn’t think I had to rush to read Bea Gates’s new poetry collection, Ten Minutes. After all, we’ve been friends for years, are in a poetry group together, and both teach in the Goddard MFA Writing Program. I was familiar with all of the poems, had seen many in … [Read more...]

Yesterday the drizzly overcast sky, which made the house seem so gloomy, wrapped the Botanic Garden in supple gray allure. Granite boulders acquired a silver sheen. The several trunks of a great dark-bodied elm showed off their polished, handsome volume, strong as … [Read more...]

If death were single but it comes mingled The inauspicious day has come and gone. The ritual fingering of wounds in the media, public ceremonies the equivalent of banging on muffled gongs, chanting of endless dirges and performance of rituals to ward off evil … [Read more...]

So, I’ve had to stop blogging for a while. Summer seemed like a good excuse. Now it’s Labor Day, which means to me that routines must be resumed or forever abandoned. Resume, then. Efficiency is going to be the watchword this time around. First thought, best … [Read more...]

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Frank Bidart has a remarkable short poem entitled "To the Republic." The poem's speaker relates a dream in which a massed multitude of Union and Confederate dead appear, traveling upon a noiseless railroad. "Disconsolate that we … [Read more...]