The Garden of Verse: January Poems in Verse-Virtual Show Poets Taking Stock at the Start of a New Year

 

 

I'm still working my way through all the poems in the January 2021

issue of Verse-Virtual, but here are some of my favorites.

 

 
Jefferson Carter’s poems often get to the place where it hurts to laugh.

In “Segue” the speaker is exhausted at the prospect of remaining on the

dance floor for a segue into “Chain Gang,” which obliges dancers to raise

“an imaginary pick ax over your head

on each “Hoh!” & striking on each “Ah!”

The image is immediately followed, no commentary required, by:

“Love, for a shy girl, you don’t sweat

much, meaning I love how you don’t sweat

being judged.”  And then by a sadder, wiser foreshadowing of the night

to come, “knowing

I’ll get up between nightmares six

or seven times to pee.”

Carter’s three February poems use self-satire along with social and

political commentary to show us to ourselves.

 

 

We find a similar pursuit of self-knowledge in “your bird does not speak english,”

Jim Lewis’s smartly titled poem that carries a bittersweet message revealed in

its conclusion. The poem offers various pleasures along the way, as in this

wonderfully precise depiction of the pet’s behavior:

 “i hear the rising volume

of a cockatiel's complaint

at being ignored. the near

train-whistle panic that you

have simply walked out of the room

without her on your shoulder”

 

I found much to admire in Penny Harter’s “Night Thoughts,” which culminates in

this beautiful word-music evocation of listening to one’s own heartbeat:

“I honor the

bloodlines that have brought me here,

 

this faithful heart that lets me fall asleep

again, wake again, stretch to  greet the

morning, breathe deeply, and rise.”

 

I like everything about Laurie Bryo’s “The Snow Angel,” a thought-dream about

the father “a wild-eyed charmer,” who returns from the afterlife

“to tell me that the dead aren’t worrying about the living, that

 

each snowflake falling is a wish spoken before it hits the earth.”

 The dialogue that follows between the living dreamer and the

spectral presence is priceless: 
“Tell me

 you aren’t disappointed dad, show me how you know

it’s all ok.  He guffaws his coffee. I would sleep like the dead.

Instead, I have dervish-toddlers, toothless men.  Mostly I have you.”

           We all have questions, the poem tells us. And dreams, perhaps, are the only

answers – and non-answers. Be sure to read the rest.

 

Tricia Knoll’s three seasonal poems deliver that cold-warm-cold feeling of

a northern winter. A stark, severe time to be existing on earth, glowing with

barely seen wonders, as envisioned in “Pagan Epiphany in the Night Woods.”

The poem evokes a sorcerer searching for truth 

“in a rarified sky,

for the Dipper pouring love

to the shivering.”

And finding this miracle: “Three sets of footprints. 

Red fox, bobcat, and doe

hold up to plummeting cold.

With what faith they cross

the road to the woods.”

            These poems shiver with insight.  

 

Tom Montag’s three selections from his ongoing lyrical epic, "The Woman

in an Imaginary Painting" continue to offer us little wonders as large as life:

“The permanence of art

is the same as death..”

            The third poem in this group walks a little circle inside a dark

museum, then comes back to its own self-mage: “She would turn

 

from darkness, yet it

holds her here. This stillness

is the same as death.”

            I am wondering if these selections share something with Whitman’s

famous assertion in “Song of Myself”: “And to die is different from what any

one supposed, and luckier.”

 

Keep reading, everybody. There’s plenty more where these came from.

The January 2021 issue includes work by 66 poets.

Go here to find your way into the poems

January 2021