Still poetry month

Three new titles for poetry available now on the Website at deerbrookeditions.com all are accomplished poets. They Join the rank of Deerbrook poets, all of whom garner recognition in some way. In the spirit of poetry month (aren’t we lucky, the powers that be give us a full month to wave the poetry flag) I am going to post a poem, and a graph about the author, for as many as I can in the remaining days.

Sarah White’s poems resonate the irony of glory and human love.

Beautiful Day by JR Solonche has delight and sorrow, insights and more.

Poetry is like getting dropped off in New Orleans.

Meditations on what cannot be seen, the music of memory.

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One hundred years ago, the war to end war

Wars Don’t Happen Anymore, the title of Sarah White’s collection, is taken from the first poem in the book, built off something an aged mother says, having lived and lost through both world wars. WWI actually began in July of 1914.

Several poems will be the libretto in a performance at Franklin Marshal College to commemorate WWI. The poster for the event is below. The books title, something of an antithesis that for me began to symbolize the absurd yet all too human condition, a tendency for making war more horrific and somehow believe they are in the name of peace. THE WAR THAT WILL END WAR, by H.G.Wells is an interesting period piece you can view. The performance is now available here https://vimeo.com/127192865

These poems by Sarah White are accomplished so I won’t try to describe or portray metaphor but I’ll give you the words of Eugene Garber:

War poems are variously full of anger, bitter irony, gore, and fervent protest that the poet already knows is futile. Such tonalities lie just beyond the outworks of Sarah White’s poems in Wars Don’t Happen Anymore and sometimes invade them. But at the center of these poems is a resonant core of grief and loss brilliantly modulated—simple elegy, the brilliant hues of vainglory, the taste of blood and iron in exotic colonies, the symphonic folly of imperial gallantry, the gorgeous flare of destruction, the endless misreading of history, the disfigurement of mind and body—in short the sorrows of war passed through a sensibility at once exquisite and capacious and one we sometimes almost wish did not remember so well.

                                   —Eugene Garber

A chorale performance in observance of the beginning of World War I. One Hundred years ago. Several poems from Sarah White’s book make up the libretto.

The poems of Sarah White

Wars Don’t Happen Anymore, poems by Sarah White is now  on the Website and amazon.

Sarah White is author of The Unknowing Muse  (Dos Madres Press, 2014), Alice Ages and Ages  (BlazeVox, 2010), Cleopatra Haunts the Hudson  (Spuyten Duyvil, 2007), Mrs. Bliss and the Paper Spouses (Pudding House chapbook, 2007), and a lyric memoir, The Poem Has Reasons: a story of far love,  on-line at http://www.proempress.com. She is co-translator of Songs of the Women Troubadours , Bruckner et al., (Garland, 2000). She is Professor Emerita of French from Franklin and Marshall College, and lives in New York City.

Here is a favorite poem from the book and two endorsements from the back cover.

I’ve been reading your poems this cold, snowy afternoon. “Enjoy” is not the right word but I have been rapt and edified.  —Wars Don’t Happen Anymore is a perfect title for a book that takes on the delusions, regrets, and brutal facts of war. Sarah White’s poems testify to specific circumstances that charge each death or reprieve from death with a story or memory or image. She has not backed down from the pity we rarely let ourselves feel. Anyone whose life has been touched by war, which is to say everyone, should read these poems whose anguished occasions are so finely suspended in the terrible amber of time.

           —Baron Wormser

War poems are variously full of anger, bitter irony, gore, and fervent protest that the poet already knows is futile. Such tonalities lie just beyond the outworks of Sarah White’s poems in Wars Don’t Happen Anymore and sometimes invade them. But at the center of these poems is a resonant core of grief and loss brilliantly modulated—simple elegy, the brilliant hues of vainglory, the taste of blood and iron in exotic colonies, the symphonic folly of imperial gallantry, the gorgeous flare of destruction, the endless misreading of history, the disfigurement of mind and body—in short the sorrows of war passed through a sensibility at once exquisite and capacious and one we sometimes almost wish did not remember so well.
—Eugene Garber

Three Tankas, and what’s to come

Please consider picking up the newest books on the Website, Wars Don’t Happen Anymore by Sarah White, A Passing by Joan I. Siegel, and Beautiful Day by JR Solonche.

  

In the works are at least two books of poetry; available now – Wars Don’t Happen Anymore  poems by Sarah White of N.Y. City; another called Once it Stops, poems by Florence Fogelin of Vermont due in summer; one book of fiction called Middle of the Night by HC HSu due later in the summer; and a book of tankas called A World Disguised As This One by Mimi White of New Hampshire; a new book os poems by Martin Steingesser called Yellow Horses will be out late July. Also very soon The Conversation: Learning to be a Poet by Dawn Potter. I know we’ve all been waiting for this one and you can find more about it here on the blog head.

Today I want to post a poem by Martina Reisz Newberry from her book Where it Goes called Three Tankas. 

Three Tankas by Martina Newberry

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