Handful of Poems I've Liked Lately

There's so much quality poetry out there these days that it's impossible to keep up with everything, but I'd like to link to a handful of poems that've really resonated for me lately.

The first, "While You Were Out" by Ernest Hilbert, appears in this week's Linebreak. It's a claustrophobic poem. Reading it reminds me of my (thankfully) brief stints in office jobs, of why--even when I complain--being a teacher suits me perfectly, and of Ophelia in the song "Desolation Row," about whom Bob Dylan sings, "Her profession is her religion/her sin is her lifelessness." It's a horror poem, in some ways.

I also really like Derek Richards's "You Know, Child", from the current Foundling Review. I have to admit that the first time I read it, I thought the voice was entertaining in places but also a little heavy-handed, the sound of someone imitating a regional voice rather than inhabiting it. But with each subsequent reading the feeling fell away, and I eventually came to like the sound it makes. But what I really love is that it has so much heart--it moved me from the first reading. Richards tosses off some stellar lines, too: a grandmother tells her grandson it is "like you're seeing something beautiful/in the dark trash the rest of us/call everyday" and says of her husband, "he speaks softly but his heart attracts volume."

And finally, there's C.E. Chaffin's "Tom Heaven" from Pedestal Magazine. Chaffin takes us from wild turkey hunt to Puritan-era America and back again in a poem that feels like it is about ascension in some important way. What I like most is that Chaffin's turkey/Puritan association is quite natural, and the image really works well (just Google a picture of a Puritan minister in his collar and frock for proof), yet to hear the author invoke Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards is still a surprise and takes the us a direction we wouldn't at first expect.

Hope you'll take a second to check these three poems out.