Poets and Poems: John Sibley Williams and “Skyscrape”

I grew up in a world where chalk used on driveways and sidewalks meant kids were exercising their artistic instincts or playing hopscotch. As poet John Sibley Williams reminds us in his newest chapbook, chalk on the sidewalk today too often signifies a crime scene. 

Skyscrape is a collection of 20 poems, a slender volume that packs a wallop. While it probes into contemporary issues, like crime, guns, immigration, political fault lines, and race, it’s not a political diatribe. Instead, Williams turns the focus inward, attempting to come to personal terms with what so often seems to be tearing America apart, with no resolution in sight.

 

Contemporary society is so saturated with politics that one’s first inclination might be to turn away from a collection like this one. That would be a mistake. Williams softens the edges by raising the issues in the context of his own life, and the lives of his children. 

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

Poets and Poems: John Sibley Williams and “Disinheritance”

I grew up in a culture that celebrated death as much as it did life. Barely a stone’s throw from the riot of Bourbon Street was St. Peter’s Cemetery No. 1 – the first of the “cities of the dead” that New Orleans was equally famous for. Life and death were Mardi Gras on Shrove Tuesday blending seamlessly into Ash Wednesday. My childhood was a thin veneer of American ingenuity underlain by deep notions of fate and fatalism.

And grief. Grief was as integral to life as was joy. My mother came from a very large, very extended family. Someone was always being born, someone was always being married, and someone was always being “waked.” I learned early that Catholic wakes always had food and alcohol; Protestant wakes might have water and cookies or mints but the alcohol, like the grief, was outside, where the men gathered, passed around in bottles wrapped in brown paper bags.

Grief is part of life, but it’s a hard part, as poet John Sibley Williams describes in his new poetry collection Disinheritance.

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