The poet Mary Oliver died this week, and I’m convinced that if we all would take a break to read her poetry, we would be strengthened by it. The level of anger – about the shut-down, the bickering, the brutal weather – is remarkably high right now. Mary Oliver believed … Read More
Tag: poetry
“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
Much like Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, this collection of elegant essays by the poet Mary Oliver is for those who “are not trying to help the world go around, but forward.” It’s a guide for dreamers – for people who … Read More
“The light tastes like laughter.”
This metaphor is simple, and yet it packs a punch. It’s from the poem “The Town Where I Belong” in Faith Shearin‘s new collection Telling the Bees. Part of its power comes from the way three of the five senses are used in these few words, a feat … Read More
“What do these extraordinary lines summon in you?”
The premise of Ten Poems to Change Your Life by Roger Housden is this: great poems can be dangerous. They can make you question your assumptions, change your direction, and find the courage to start over. I believe that reading can lead to reflection that inspires transformation. In fact, I’m … Read More
“August is huge and blue, a glittering gemstone curving dangerously at either end into what precedes and follows it.
One afternoon about twenty years ago, someone on NPR read the poem “On the Island” by Elizabeth Spires. I was driving my car, and I was so moved that I almost went into the ditch. This poem is infused with tension between the past and the future. Here … Read More
“If trees could speak they wouldn’t. . .
The poem continues: “. . . only hum some low green note, roll their pinecones down the empty streets and blame it, with a shrug, on the cold wind. During the day they sleep inside their furry bark, clouds shredding like ancient lace above their crowns.” These wonderful sentences, which … Read More