As I read Emily Bright’s new collection of poetry, it was the word “ground” in the title that kept coming to mind. “Ground” has a double meaning. It can be the physical ground we stand and walk upon and that our homes occupy, and it can be the historical, genealogical, emotional, psychological, and social realities that gives shape to and hold our lives in place. While This Ground Beneath Our Feet includes both, it is the second kind that Bright really focuses on.
The collection, appropriately enough, uses the metaphor of a growing tree to organize the poems into four sections. The poems of “Roots” draw from her family history – colonists traveling to a new land, the ocean passage itself, and clearing the land in their new homes. The poems of “Ground” move to both the physical landscape as well what the land produces. These are not confined solely to space; one poem describes interplanetary space travel but still manages to be about ground. The poems of “Branches” move closer to her own contemporary life, and “Seeds” describes not only scenes of childhood but also cultural seeds, like reading poetry in a prison environment.
For a very long time, no one in my father’s family – father, aunts, uncles, grandmother, or cousins – knew why the family Bible contained a death notice. The name was Jarvis Seale; the only thing the listing had was the date of his death. Who was this person? Why was he considered so important that my great-grandfather, who’d penned every entry in the records, had included him. My father guessed Jarvis might have been a distant cousin, or a close friend.
It was only in the years I’d been doing reading and research for my historical novel Brookhaven that I discovered the answer, and then it was simply by happenstance. The key was the date of his death.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
Navigating relationships can be difficult. Marriage relationships. Parent-child relationships. Relationships between siblings or friends. They can break, again for all kinds of reasons. And it’s the aftermath of these breaks, and people traveling through modern life, that poet Tobi Alfier explores in Goodbye Kisses: Poems.
In Alfier’s poems, the people involved wander afterward in a desolate landscape. It doesn’t matter who might have been right and who was wrong. Enough desolation exists for everyone. Some try to move on quickly. Others linger, immobilized. They walk beaches. They visit bars. They trace their hands over old carved initials in a tree. Some sit in old motel rooms, alcohol in a paper cup. Some sit at kitchen tables and stare.
I’d read Charles Dickens in high school (David Copperfield, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities), but it was only when I was working as a speechwriter for a CEO that it became serious. He read Dickens, a lot of Dickens, and I was expected to read what he read. And to quote Dickens. So, I did. And I discovered how much I enjoyed his works. I’ve visited the Dickens Museum in London five times and joined the Dickens Fellowship. I read Pickwick Papers back in the 1990s, bit I was reminded of it this week when I saw Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern post and discuss a poem Dickens included in that work – “Ode to an Expiring Frog.”
It was called a miracle, and it may have saved the American Revolution. The British had occupied Boston, and in very short order, cannons were transported in almost impossible conditions from Fort Ticonderoga on the New York-Vermont border to the hills overlooking Boston. The ensuing bombardment forced the British to their ships in Boston Harbor. In nearby Quincy, Abigal Adams watched the bombardment and sent her observations to her husband John. The transfer of the cannons was a hugely successful operation, and it even had some involvement by none other than Benedict Arnold.
As many times as we’ve visited London, I can remember using the iconic red telephone box only once. It was 1983, my wife was recovering from a prescription reaction at our hotel, and I called her at 3 p.m. as the bells of St. Paul’s rang out the hour. More than 40 years later, phone boxes are generally used for one reason – for tourists to take photographs. (There’s one near Parliament Square that always has a long line of people wanted to snap a photo of a phone box with Big Ben and the houses of Parliament in the background.) Spitalfields life posted some pictures of phone boxes this week, and yes, they’re still there.
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