Dreamers Rise

I found a copy of this chapbook on the giveaway shelf in our local library and brought it home, knowing only that the author, Derek Mahon,...

Four stanzas from the medieval Irish legend Buile Suibne , variously translated as The Frenzy of Suibhne or Sweeney Astray : There was a ti...

It's morning Nobody's up but the crows Memphis Minnie and Joe McCoy are singing "Can I Do It For You?" as if they were...

I pulled out this slender letterpress chapbook the other day when I was looking for something else. I had forgotten that I owned it. The cov...

Down valley a smoke haze Three days heat, after five days rain Pitch glows on the fir-cones Across rocks and meadows Swarms of new flies...

William Wordsworth: ... once in the stillness of a summer's noon, While I was seated in a rocky cave By the sea-side, perusing, so ...

The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits; on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the ...

The writer Charles Simmons, who died two years ago, wrote a half-dozen novels, of which I've read only two. As far as I know he never p...

From Regarding Wave

The poem below was printed in a local newspaper in 1966. As the name of the poet would mean nothing to anyone who didn't know her perso...

Two translations of the last lines of Pablo Neruda's "Ars Poetica," from Residence on Earth : but the truth is, suddenly, the ...

From "Station Island," II. The narrator converses with the shade of William Carleton: 'The angry role was never my vocation,...

I am no poet— and have no religion, no creed, no faith except the little that I need to get up in the morning and dig in a few seeds (n...

(A poem from a different time and different circumstances — but like all good prophecies, it has broken the bounds of whatever impulses firs...

It rains and keeps raining. My soul is wet from hearing it. So much rain. . . — Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet I will die in Pa...

Two poems about change, stone, farming, New England — and, obliquely, the ancient world. First up, Robert Frost: Of the Stones of the Place...

The fundamentals — trees, sky, water, the calling of crows — do not change. Smoke rises above the tea-house. The geese glean the fields...

THE LATE HOUR A man walks towards town, a slack breeze smelling of earth and the raw green of trees blows at his back. He drags the we...

Back in the late 1970s I read this translation by the late Gabriel Berns of what is actually only the first volume (comprising Books One a...

These two faded and stained studio portraits of African-American couples were taken sometime in the early decades of the twentieth century...