Poets and Poems: Shanna Powlus Wheeler and “Evensong for Shadows”

Poet and writer Max Porter tells us that grief is a thing with feathers. Shanna Powlus Wheeler would say it might have feathers, but grief is something that’s always with us, hidden but ever-present even in times of joy. Like joy, grief is part of life.

The title of Wheeler’s first full poetry collection, Evensong for Shadows, suggests the omnipresence of grief. Evensong is sung in the evening, as the day wanes. Shadows are a picture of what substance is, or was. Grief is life, or very much a part of life, a measure of the loss of love or happiness or relationship. The more intense the love, the greater the grief.

The opening poem, “After a Tour of Britain,” quietly introduces the theme. The poet is dreaming of “nameless ruined abbeys, / naves without roofs / like Holyrood in Edinburgh.” One thinks of Shakespeare’s “bare ruin’d choirs” in Sonnet 73, a lament of the passing of time and the approaching winter of old age.

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

Poetic Voices: Susan Lewis and Shanna Powlus Wheeler

In Heisenberg’s Salon, poet Susan Lewis draws inspiration from a principle of quantum mechanics. In 1925, physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) published what is known as his Uncertainty Principle – that in any system, you can’t know a particle’s exact location and exact velocity at the same time. You can exactly know one or the other, but not both at the same time.

This idea of uncertainty is what Lewis develops in 54 prose poems – but not applied to quantum mechanics. Instead, she considers uncertainty in relationships, in human actions, in human thought, our perceptions, and how we understand the world.

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