Tuesday, September 3, 2024

Poets and Poems: Claire Coenen and "The Beautiful Keeps Breathing"


We recently bought a birdbath for the garden outside our kitchen window. Other than the things they don’t tell you, like how much maintenance it’s going to be (a lot), we’ve enjoyed watching a host of the feathered set come visiting – a pair of wrens, a bluejay that scolds everything in sight, and a dove, with our favorite being a mama cardinal, plunging herself into the water and enjoying a full bath. They don’t mind us watching, as long as we don’t make sudden moves.
 

The lead poem in The Beautiful Keeps Breathing, the first collection by Claire Coenen, is entitled “More Beautiful,” and it could have been written sitting at our kitchen window. Coenen watches a mourning dove bathing “in the bowl of water, her underbelly / cradled by gathered rain, her bord body / unashamed of its plumpness.” Nearby is a dogwood “flaunting rose quartz blooms,” and an oak with its sprawling roots. And she sees all these everyday things from her porch swing.

To continue reading, please see me post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

The 2024 Society of Classical Poets International Poetry Competition.

 

The 2024 Society of Classical Poets International High School Poetry Competition.

 

Hartshead – poem by David Whyte.

 

Edges – poem by Lee Kiblinger at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

Ghost of a Robin – poem by Margaret Koger at Every Day Poems. 

“A Summer’s Day by the Sea,” poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

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