Poets and Poems: Susan Rooke and “A Room Full of Ghosts”

Just recently, for some unknown and unprompted reason, a memory flashed from when I was eight or nine years old. I was visiting my grandmother in Shreveport for a summer week. I was sitting on the floor of her living room in the small frame house built by my grandfather and father. The front door opened, I looked up, and there stood what looked a younger version of my Aunt Rubye. I stared. She was equally taken aback; she was seeing the protective older brother she knew as a child.  

The entrance of my grandmother from the kitchen broke the spell. She introduced us. It was my Aunt Ruth, barely if ever mentioned by my father. They hadn’t spoken in almost 25 years, and they wouldn’t for almost another 20, when she was diagnosed with an inoperable cancer.

 

My memory had been shaped and created by something that had happened some 15 years before that surprise meeting, and it would open into an extended story of how a brother and sister had fallen out. I would come to understand that every memory was its own story, and it didn’t have to be a story I was personally part of until that front door opened.

 

What likely put me in mind of that memory was A Room Full of Ghosts: Poems of Remembering, the 2025 collection by Susan Rooke. 

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Identifying happenings – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

Poetry Prompt: Meet Your Muse Terpsichore – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

What Did You Do Last Week? – poem by Erin Murphy at Every Day Poems.

 

“Mr. Flood’s Party,” poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

The Friend Who Turned Out to Be a Poet

For many years, until they changed the closing time, my wife and I could be found most Sunday afternoons at the YMCA in out suburb of St. Louis. I had a routine – start with cardio like the treadmill or stationary bike and find in the Cybex machine room. There was a fairly regular crowd there each Sunday, working out from about 5 to 6 p.m. One of those regulars was an older man, about six-foot-five. We knew him as Paul. 

My wife started chatting with him first. And then he spoke to me one Sunday, saying he’d heard I was from New Orleans. He had relatives there, too, even though he was from St. Louis. We’d talk while on the Cybex machines, and he didn’t say much about his own life, other than he liked poetry as much as I did and he loved to visit New Orleans.

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

The same – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

The Poem That Outlived the Holocaust – Douglas Century a The Free Press.

 

“Comin thro’ the rye,” poem by Robert Burns – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Poets and Poems: Siân Killingsworth and “Hiraeth”

I haven’t lived in New Orleans for more than 50 years, but when I think about the idea of “home,” it’s what first comes to mind. Whenever we visit, though, few things are what I remember. My old neighborhood superficially looks the same, but the neighbors themselves, of course, have all changed, often many times over. The French Quarter is still there, but that coffee shop catacorner to the Presbytere on Jackson Square was the Louisiana Library, where I did research on papers in high school. The building housing my father’s printing business on Gravier Street in the business district is now a condominium. How did that happen? 

No, you can’t go home again. Or perhaps you can, but it’s no longer the home you remember.

 

“Hiraeth” is a Welsh word that translates directly into English as “longing.” As poet Siân 

 Killingsworth quotes in her chapbook entitled Hiraeth: Poems, it implies “a spiritual longing for a home that perhaps never was.” It’s the home that occupies our minds and hearts, the home we remember. The quotation comes from an art / video exhibition in 2022 by UK artist Jayne Lee.

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

The hard Frost – Brenda Wineapple at The New Criterion.

 

Braving the Poem: Interview with Catherine Abbey Hodges – Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Sayers in Paradise: From Dante to Dorothy – Seth Myers at An Unexpected Journal.

 

The Road He Took: A Lenten Reading of Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” – Heather Cadenhead at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

“Piano,” poem by D.H. Lawrence – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Poets and Poems: Dana Gioia and "Meet Me at the Lighthouse"

Flashback to 20 years ago: I had a cousin who’s about 15 years older than I am. Out of the blue, she began calling. I had become the keeper of the family Bible, and she needed information from the family records section. Several phone calls ensued. I was slightly tickled at how ardent she was about pursuing family history. Years later, I understood. I was doing the same thing, chasing down certain death notices, military listings, and cryptic notices left by others on Family Search and Ancestry.com. (And when did I join those web sites?) 

You reach a certain age, and certain things become more important than they once were. This is not unusual; in fact, it’s a common development once you reach you 60s. Art becomes more important. So does great literature (the stuff that’s lasted). And genealogy, as if we need to know where we came from before we become just another record in the family Bible.

 

Ask Dana Gioia (1950-). Better still, read his new poetry collection, Take Me to the Lighthouse: Poems. It’s not a nostalgic collection; Gioia is too clear-eyed a poet to start looking backward and remembering only the good parts. But it is a collection about family, about memory, about growing up, and about what once was but is no longer.

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

Poets and Poems: Laura Mullen and "After I Was Dead"

November, 2022: It’s just over 53 years since I first walked on the campus at LSU in Baton Rouge as a college freshman. I’m in the school’s bookstore, which is nothing like the one I remember in the Student Union. This one is across the street and operated by Barnes and Noble. And in this day of electronic textbooks, the bookstore more resembles a large department store filled with LSU-brand clothing and merchandise of all shapes, sizes and varieties. 

Still, there are physical books, tucked away on the second floor. Right by the escalator are two shelves of books by faculty authors. And it’s there I find After I was Dead, a poetry collection by Laura Mullen bearing the sticker “faculty author.” 

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

Poets and Poems: Paulette Guerin and "Wading through Lethe"

In Greek mythology, five rivers flowed through Hades, the underworld. The Rover Styx was the boundary between Earth and Hades. Phlegethon was the river of fire. Cocytus was the river of lamentation. Acheron was the river of sorrow. And the river forming the boundary with Elysium was Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, which flowed through the cave of Hypnos, the god of sleep. To drink of the River Lethe was to experience forgetfulness, perhaps the final step toward death. 

Poet Paulette Guerin doesn’t want to forget. She uses the Greek myth in her new collection, Wading through Lethe, to remember her family, her childhood, visits to relatives, the hurricane party in her college dorm, travels to Europe as an exchange student and vacations in the U.S., and even cleaning out the attic. She wades through the River Lethe but doesn’t drink of its forgetfulness. She may be stirring its waters, but she’s consciously doing so to not forget the experiences and people which have shaper and life and herself.

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

Poets and Poems: Thomas Colquith and “Let Our Memories Escape”

Awareness of time is heightened at two periods of our lives. When we are very young, time appears to move at a glacial pace, especially as we approach birthdays or holidays like Christmas. Nothing seems to make it go faster. When we reach a certain age, often in our mid-to-late-60s, we notice that time is accelerating and seems to be approaching the speed of light. Nothing seems to slow it down. 

Poet Thomas Colquith plays with time. That’s not “play” in the sense of amusement, relaxation, and entertainment, but more in the sense of understanding, experimentation, and speculation. The 52 poems of his latest collection Let Our Memories Escape are meditations on time, the past, the present, and what might have been, but wasn’t.

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

Poets and Poems: Charles Hughes and “The Evening Sky”

Poet Charles Hughes teaches us something about poetry – and the evening sky. When you see the sky of the fading day, late afternoon turning to twilight, you may see a sky of sunlit and kaleidoscopic brilliance, or a sky of muted pastel color, or even neutral grays and whites and fading blues. Hughes sees those things, too. But he also sees life. 

His latest collection, The Evening Sky, is a slender volume of 31 poems exploring and honoring family, memory, people, children, Christmas, faith, and joy. One poem, “Elegy for My Father,” is six connected poems exploring key events in his father’s life – events that shaped his father’s life, and thus his own. 

 

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

Poets and Poems: Matt Duggan and "The Kingdom"

Memory, and memories, can become tangled in the reality of current experience. The backyards or gardens of the homes we grew up in somehow shrink over the years. Beloved teachers age and retire. Images and scenes from vacations or holidays rarely remain how we remember them. Even books and poems seem to change over time, becoming sometimes less and sometimes more impactful and profound. 

A high school English teacher once told me class that you needed to read Don Quixote by Cervantes three times – once in youth, once in middle age, and once in old age, because, she said, the book would change. I’ve read it twice – in youth and middle age – and discovered she was absolutely correct. Reading it at 40 was not the same as reading it at 17.

Poet Matt Duggan is no stranger to how memory gets tangled. His latest chapbook, The Kingdom, is about, among other things, returning to what’s past, and wondering if the past never really was. Too often it’s not what we remember it to be. And we feel a loss.

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

Finding Jack Gilbert and "Refusing Heaven" in a Bookstore

We were in Chicago for a concert; actually, the concert was in the northern suburb of Evanston, home of Northwestern University, and our hotel was in nearby Skokie. Across the interstate from the hotel was a rather large shopping center, which had a Barnes & Noble bookstore, which necessitated a visit. Or two.

Jack Gilbert

We browsed the bookstore one chilly autumn afternoon, when the store was nearly empty. The literature and poetry sections were on the lower, basement level. I remember seeing a table loaded with a sale of Winston Graham’s Poldark books, the television series then all the rage on PBS. The poetry section was rather large, larger than what I was used to seeing at a Barnes & Noble. I browsed and browsed, gradually finding a stack of books in my arms.

One of those books was Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert (1925-2012). It had been published in 2005, more than a decade before, and the copy in my hands was a third printing edition that looked brand new (imagine three editions of a poetry collection in the same year). I had a copy of his Collected Poems (2014) at home, which included the poems of Refusing Heaven. I didn’t need to buy the copy in front of me. I was intrigued by its just-off-the-press condition – the book didn’t have a bit of wear on it.

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

Poets and Poems: Bernard O’Donoghue and “The Seasons of Cullen Church”

I hadn’t read the poetry of Bernard O’Donoghue before his most recent collection, The Seasons of Cullen Church. And yet, reading these poems, it seemed that I’d been reading him all of my life.

The poems O’Donoghue includes are poems of reflection and revisiting. No, you can’t go home again, but you can consider home in memory, and a life in memory, and understand what was important then is less so now, and what is important now was barely discernible then.

The Seasons of Cullen Church is a consideration of a life.

What does it mean for a grandfather to die at a young age, before his grandchildren will ever know him except by story and the memories of others? Or why did that copy of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary smell like cigarette smoke? Or remembering the insemination of dairy cows? Or seeing the nameplate on the school you attended? Or perhaps what it’s like to be traveling and arriving in an unfamiliar town?

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

Photograph: Bernard O'Donoghue at Oxford University.