Real and Imagined, Pleasures and Pain: New Poems from Forty Poets in the March 2020 Verse-Virtual

I am impressed by the poems in March 2020 issue of Verse-Virtual that 'go deep' -- full disclosure: I served as the guest editor for this issue. Read them for yourself at

https://prosegarden.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-garden-of-verse-real-and-imagined.html 

I'm talking about poems such as Alarie Tennille's poem "Taking Forever One Day at a Time," with splendid details in every stanza. For example:

"hearing your voice in conversation
downstairs before realizing
that you’re talking to the cats
in the same serious tone you use
with plumbers"

The poem builds on evocations, from here, from fond recollections, little things, habits -- holding the speaker's hand crossing streets, writing disparaging comments in the margins of books he reads -- to build a word portrait of a 'forever' relationship. A marvelous poem about intimacy.

          And by the imagistic tour of the stages and struggles of putting together a successful lyric offered by Kate Sontag in "Before It Was A Poem," in lines such as these:

"In the house of do-over dreams
the writer sleeps on pencil shavings
and eraser dust, unlearns standard
grammar skills, relinquishes any
obsession with formal elements
of syntax, diction, parallelism."

Yes, "the house of do-over dreams." Sound familiar? Also, Kate's poem "The Poet and the Bee" with its the noirish reference to the classic "Black Dahlia" crime-story to give the poem its sting. From noir mystery –

For all we knew

"she could have been lying,or believed her own lie..."

This poem's buzz takes us to the unexpected prophetic revelation:

"Call it style. Call ita singer whose ghost was a missing guitar.So this was poetry."

Mystery is the mood as well in Penny Harter's enigmatic poem "The Oracle" about a creature, perhaps half-imagined, known by signs but never seen:

"The oracle predicts without speaking,
slaps its tail for emphasis, eludes our traps.
It knows we are bigger than it is,
has learned that we don’t care to heed
the messages it brings us from the deep."

         The theme of human bonds to the wild species that share our universe plumbs the depths of her poem "Snowy Owl," which evokes the animal magic of humanity's ancient connections:
"As a child in my bed at night, I listened to neighborhood dogs, heard their barking picked up by others farther and farther away until it seemed I could faintly hear all the way back to First Dog."

Ingrid Bruck's lively depiction of a place she calls "Country Abecedarian" relies on the evidence of the senses to make a fantasy familiar, citing

"manacled ribs vibrate waves of cicada buzz, the screech
noise joins bleating lambs and grunting hogs.
often crows gather in murders cawing the news."

I've often wondered about the correct term for a gang of crows. "Murders" sounds about right. I cannot imagine a wild place without their annoying, but often provocative commentaries:

And I am moved to wonder by Shoshauna Shy's richly imagined biography for a waiting room patient, called (in the poem's title) the "Silver-Bearded Man in the Waiting Room at the Dental Clinic" -- a presence whom, the speaker of the poem confides, she will never get to know:

"I will not learn his eldest daughter’s
nickname for him nor the story
of how he earned it, where he found
his dog if he has one, what route
he biked after taking the Merrimac
Ferry toward Baraboo. I will not find
out in what country he last drank
a glass of wine."

These are marvelous mysteries. I'm not sure that a flesh and blood connection would be as rich in detail as the person made of words imagined by this poem's speaker. I have no idea where "Baraboo" is, but it sounds like somewhere intriguing. And why should his 'eldest' daughter (how many, we wonder, does he have?) invent a nickname for him, as opposed to, say, the conventional "Dad," "Pops," "Pater," etc. The poem may indicate a longing for connection, but the 'conversation' it starts in the reader's mind may be more fertile than a real one.

Mystery too abounds in Dianna Henning's poem with the alluring title "The Village Lives in the Sheep; the Sheep in the Village." Who would not wonder at such sheep as those, noted here, who escape the walls of their pens to

"wander as though touring the nearby, shags of wool hanging off their chests, their eyes electric with storms."
Any poem with a phrase like 'their eyes electric with storms' makes me a believer. And this poem's final two sentences, strung through four stanzas, serves an as object lesson in the uses of enjambment. Please see them for your self.
These are a few that poems that spoke to me. I have a lot more reading to do.

See these poems and more at Verse-Virtual March 2020.