Check It Out

No, I have not mixed up the days.  I know this is Monday. I know this is the day reserved for nonfiction.  Thank goodness poetry is non-fiction. I must talk about the book of poetry I stumbled into over the weekend.

The first weekend in May is usually the “college girls” weekend, in which my friends from college have gotten together for about 18 years.  This year, however, it fell apart, things came up for just about everyone. That was the bad news.  The good news was that my husband and the pooches and I drove to Seaside, OR spending the weekend with our friends. 

So Saturday afternoon, my friend Barbara, my husband and I decided to hit the local bookstore, Beach Books.  We walked in just in time for  cheese, crackers, wine, and the poetry reading by Rosalee van Stelten, author of Pavlov’s Elephant.  Talk about serendipity! 

Rosalee’s poetry is visual, makes you laugh and think.  Even my poor husband( who thought we were just on a trip to the grocery store) was engaged. At one point I thought I might lose it when I looked over at him and he had his mouth covered.  Images of our teenage daughter and her first experience with melted brie flooded my brain. (She had no idea of its texture and about lost it at the table).  My husband, however, was worried that the crackers were too noisy in his mouth.

Pavlov’s Elephant is a great little addition to my personal poetry collection.  She has drawn on her own experiences to create the following categories for poems: “Knifing toward spring”, “Under the Same Small Sky”, “the petals against my flesh”, and “echoes”

I blurted out that I missed writing 30 poems in 30 days by one poem.  She shared the following in acknowledgement of my even attempting to write 30 in 30.

Begetting

Some believe
spiders hatch their eggs
by staring at them

I believe
by staring at this page
I will hatch a poem.

Oh yes, that is the way I feel some days.

The other favorite section of her are the “Echoes” poems, her own creation.  From each longer line, she uses the last word to “echo”

Cannon Beach, Oregon

before dawn                                                                                          dawn
bled into break of day, rain wrapped                                                     wrapped
the moonless beach                                                                               beach
in sheets of slate, while shorebirds                                                       shorebirds
like strewn boulders, hunched                                                               hunched
against the wailing wind,the thundering                                                thundering
surf, and cloud piled upon cloud                                                           cloud
turned all the world to grey                                                                    grey

midmorning                                                                                           midmorning
on the wet wash of a receding tide                                                        tide
a lone gull                                                                                             gull
reflecting                                                                                               reflecting

I love this. It reminds me of how I am playing with combining pantuom and haiku together.  Chicken Spaghetti is rounding up the books today.

Thanks for indulging me with my poetry book round-up today. It just could not wait until Friday.
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Happy Reading.

MsMac