Cover of Visions International number 95, published in 2017. See below for poems from this issue. ​

​From 2005 through 2023, at least sixteen of my poems were selected by the editor and proprietor, Bradley Strahan, for publication in Visions International. In some ways, I felt that the first of these poems, “Wasted, Not Needed,” marked a milestone in my ever-modest poetic career. I saw a classified ad in Poets and Writers seeking submissions. I bought a sample copy, recognized that many of my poems were compatible with the editor’s sensibility, and successfully submitted. I have continued to enjoy the excellent work selected by Brad, not least the translations into English from international poets. I always liked submitting to Brad: he made up his mind and communicated his decisions quickly. I look forward to continued excellence under the editorship of Brad’s successor, Cal Nordt.

Many of the poems are reproduced here in scanned copies from the magazine. Where I kept a record, I’ve noted the issue number and year of publication.

“Wasted, Not Needed,” later retitled “Ripeness Is All,” was republished in my chapbook, Night Weather, in Scott Owens’ review of Night Weather, and in the Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. VII: North Carolina.
 
No. 73, 2005

No. 80, 2009
True incident. 

No. 95, 2017 (the cover is shown above)
I was selected by Brad as the number's featured poet. As I was writing this post, I came across an online appreciation of the magazine and of this number by B. Morrison: “Each issue also has a featured poet, with several pages devoted to their work. In this issue the featured poet is J.S. Absher of Raleigh, NC. One of his poems, ‘The Past and Time to Come’, starts with a cow grazing in a meadow and moves through the lovely names of their four stomachs into a scene where a salesman is philosophising [sic] about time in a bar. Sounds odd perhaps, but the juxtaposition works.” It's the juxtaposition of rural and urban, of time as season and time as commodity. The boy can't say what he knows; the salesman can't stop talking. 

​Perhaps I was reminded of the Edith Piaf song quoted in the poem below when I watched Saving Private Ryan (1998). Whenever a poem comes together only reluctantly, as this one did, I think of something that Czeslaw Milosz wrote: "straining [in poetry] comes to nothing, for we receive the gift whether we are deserving of it or not" ("Ambition," in Milosz's ABC's).

No. 104, Feb 2021
The two poems in this issue are old. “We Lay Our Burdens on Time” originated in an experience I had as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” in France in the period 1972-1973. I don't remember when I started the poem, but it was a long time ago. "Alive" was drafted not long after the events it describes from 1990. 

​Alive
1990           

I sit on your porch. I’ve painted the house inside
and helped you move. You keep the refrigerator,
the washer and dryer; I keep the car.
We split the child, Solomon-like. 

For some reason we look up and see
fifty or sixty red-necked vultures
climbing a massive thermal, towering
over some dead body. 

Something is dead, but we are alive,
our son is alive and safe. 
In the marsh across the yard
peepers and croakers, in their strident

amphibian heat, are carrying on.
We part with an awkward, reluctant
hug. Nature may be indifferent
to the singers, but the chorus sings on. 

2022 or 2023
Heifer
 
Destined for slaughter
she wades into the water
to the belly and drinks deep.

Does she see her own sad eyes
wide and innocent in the pool
looking up out of the sky?

Soon fear will make her bellow,
but now her muzzle is cool
and wet. Her skin twitches,

scattering flies; her switch
brushes them off. Across the water
she sees a pasture

she will never graze,
a clump of trees
that will never give her shade.
 
 
Tell Me Where All Past Years Are
 
She had a broad lap, a feed sack apron.
We sat warming on the stoop,
and everything around falling
fell onto her sack, golden
catkins, chinquapin burs, pods
of locust sticky with their honey,
dust of stars, dust out of the furrows.
She hummed; I translate:
     When will the time come back to me
when hours were in my pocket
as many and heavy as loose pennies, 
when days oozed thicker than
end-of-summer honey, when happiness
formed in my hands like butter from the churn
to squeeze and pat into a cake
and print with a petal crown of daisies?
     Now we both are humming, sixty or more
years between renditions, and while
we sing the sun clocks out and the moon
on the ridgetop stands and shakes out its lap,
a glowing radium dial.
 
No. 108, 2023 

In the last three months, I have been away from home more than half the time dealing with illness and death in the family and the emotions and the mountain of work that follow the death of the last living parent. The details of the work that seems so onerous now—handling the legal and financial responsibilities, sorting through Mom’s belongings to decide what to keep or give away or throw away, and identifying photos, letters, mementoes, and other items that should be preserved for the next generation—will in memory be simplified and eventually, perhaps, forgotten. But many of the pictures and newspaper clippings will live on in the archives of FamilySearch.org. as I scan and upload them.
 
Settling the estate belongs to personal and family history, but often enough the photos, newspaper clippings (many from the mid-1940s), and mementoes evoke history writ large. When I was a little boy, I had a Hav-A-Tampa cigar box full of paper money. In going through the boxes Mom stored in the attic, I came across the money (but not the box). The million-mark note shown above, apparently issued in Trier in 1928, is an ugly bit of work, even without the tape browned by age. The tape looks no worse now than it did almost 70 years ago. It wasn’t sticky then and isn’t now. This bill is the only one in the stash I clearly remember.

I don’t remember trying to read the writing on the note; that’s rather odd, because I read everything, often aloud, including billboards along the highway. But we didn’t have a German dictionary (and may not have had a dictionary of any kind until I got a Thorndike-Barnhart in the fourth grade). I remember wondering whether the note was worth a lot, but someone (probably Daddy) explained the hyperinflation that ravaged Germany in the early 1920s and made money worthless. What Daddy didn’t explain, and perhaps didn’t know, is that the German currency stabilized after 1924, so I still don’t know what value, if any, the bill ever possessed.

The million-mark note provided a memorable lesson in history, a discovery of terrible things that had happened and could happen again. The note did evoke an interest in economics, but it did waken an historical imagination that links an insignificant artifact to faraway events and cultures and foreshadows future dreadful possibilities. 
 
I don’t recall using the bills in play, though perhaps I’ve forgotten. I liked to look at them and the now lost stripes from my father’s uniform that were also in the box.
 
A picture of the recovered stash is below. When I was a kid, I liked world maps. My favorite was a jigsaw puzzle that had the United States on one side and a world map on the other. The US map was brightly colored and cheerful; the world map was darker and foreboding—no doubt a lesson in history and nationalism. In a small way, I also collected foreign postage stamps; like the notes below, they provided a kind of map to the world, bearing images of heroes, rulers, and monuments unknown to me that represented peoples and cultures with their own history.
 

At moments like now, when a demon's face appears to be rising above the horizon, I think of Walter Benjamin's "angel of history, which flies backwards with its hands raised to its face, appalled by the spectacle of the ruins piling up constantly before its eyes" (Clive James, "Hegel," in Cultural Amnesia, Norton, 2007, p. 307).

Posted 15 September 2025

​7:30 am, North Wilkesboro. The fog over the Yadkin River below me has dissipated to the west, but it still lies snug in the valley to the east. A thicker bank of fog hangs over the Brushy Mountains to the east.

I have been at my mom’s house for more than a week. In preparation for putting it on the market, we are systematically emptying it. It is becoming a house that we hope someone will be able to imagine as a home.

We said Mom she was not a hoarder, and we still say it, but with a substantial qualification. The house was not cluttered, but closets and drawers and shelves were often full. It’s a big house, with two wings. The newer, one-story wing, built in the fifties, has a large kitchen and breakfast nook, a snug den, a large master bedroom, and a small bathroom. Between the bedroom and the den is a hall with walk-in closets on both sides and the bathroom.

Connecting the new wing with the old is a short hall and the dining room, large enough for a table that seats eight (with room for two or three kids to join), a sideboard and a China hutch.

The original block was built early in the last century and was known as the Coffey house; from full basement to full attic, it has four stories. The basement has a three-room apartment and four additional rooms. The first story has a living room, a library, a small laundry room, and a sunroom. The second story has a large master bedroom, a nursery adjoining, two other bedrooms, and a bathroom. The attic has three rooms, two of them finished. In all, fourteen rooms, plus two bathrooms and the laundry room. There are shelves and drawers everywhere. The kitchen has numerous floor-to-ceiling cherrywood cabinets. The short hallway connecting den and kitchen with the dining room has three wide, deep drawers under the counter, two cabinets with shelves over the counter, and a large shelf-less area under the counter where the tools were kept.

In the first and second story of the old block, the closets are small, and most of the storage was in the China hutch, the sideboard, desks, dressers, bureaus, nightstands, a media center, and the shelves of the library. In one of the dresser drawers my sister found a photo album of the Irwin family; the parents of my mother’s mother were both Irwins. One of the photos, a faded picture of the toddler Squire Alvin Irwin (1870-1954), must be from around 1872:

​I’ve identified the picture from the faint pencil inscription on the back, here edited and blown up to make it legible:

​Another photo is of Squire’s mother, Lucinda Sina (or Sinia) Caudill (1833-1918) in her old age:

I’ve joked about finding gold or bearer bonds in a closet or drawer or in one of the old, dust-covered boxes in the attic, but instead we’ve found the Irwin album, two scrapbooks kept by someone in the Irwin family (one contains many newspaper clippings of local interests from World War 2), an old Absher photo album, and the numerous letters my brothers sent home while they were serving their missions for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
 
Another treasure from the Irwin album is the picture of two of Squire’s daughters--my grandmother, Sina Anyce and her older sister, Lula--that introduces this essay. We also found the picture of their younger brother Roy (1904-1907) who died as a toddler. The closed eyes and half-open mouth suggest to me that it was taken after his death:

These are mostly happy discoveries. Roy’s childhood death must have been deeply painful to the family, but to find a photo of him almost 120 years after his death is a small triumph over forgetfulness. We can share in a very small way his family’s grief.
 
I’ll end for now with one of the saddest domestic photographs I’ve ever seen. In my poems I’ve written often about the challenging and painful life of my maternal grandmother, Sallie Mae Grubb Absher (1903-1983), known to her grandchildren as Memaw. Here’s the photo from the Absher album we discovered in Mama's effects. It was taken at the old Duncan place where Sallie and her family lived for several years, until the early 1950s:

The depth of emotions on her face escapes words—reluctance to be photographed, pain, barely concealed anguish, reproach.

Some of my poems remembering and imagining her life:
 
 
Pregnant
 
She hitches her housedress up to her thighs
and wades into the middle of the creek--
a pool spreading under an arch of trees,
its rocky bed counterpaned with silt.
Away from Mother’s biting tongue and eyes,
she sees the shiners darting, sleek and quick,
the waves like puppies licking at her knees.
She dreams of the mouth her little breast will fill.

The evening takes her under its gray wing
and holds her close. In the darkening water
she can just make out blue sky behind leaves
as black as funeral crape. That’s how her future
weaves its nest and broods, cooing and trembling
over brittle eggs that will make her heart grieve.
--Pinesong 2012
 
*****
 
First Drink
21 September 1939
 
At dusk, Daddy sends me to Dancy’s
for baking soda and snuff for Granny.
Means coming home alone in the dark.
Singing’s a brave maker, so my voice
is waking the roosting birds
when I notice a shadowy man
coming my way. I stop singing.
He steps into the moonlight.

Unsteady on his feet, Wingler
sits down in the road flat on his rear,
legs out forming a V. He’s wearing
new overalls, a white shirt, and his Sunday
blue serge coat. He pulls a fruit jar
from his pocket, unscrews the zinc lid,
turns it up, takes a big swallow, smacks
his lips, then sets the jar between his feet.

Drink all you want. Ain’t fit for nothing else.
It burns going down and my eyes water,
but I say, Damn good corn. I’ll turn 13
soon, Mama’s just home from the asylum,
her hair cut close like a man’s. She’s not
how I remember. But the night is glowing.
I float home on a bubble, singing.
--New Verse Review (2024)
 
*****
 
Winter Rain Daylong Falling
 
I sit in the dark recalling Memaw’s chinquapins
poured from a paper sack and heaped on her lap.
She culled the wormy nuts and told me stories.

We sat in the light of the store’s big window,
in the light of her smile, beside a silent Philco,
Paris, Moscow and Chungking on the dial.

Later she gave me a book on the war called Great,
the boys in Belleau Wood falling in the wheat,
her name on the flyleaf penciled “Sallye,”

and an interlinear “pony” of the Gallic Wars
to ride out Caesar’s prose (“he did see a battle to be-
about-to-be”) during her year at Glade Valley.

It must have hurt to cull the chinquapins, to clothespin
shirts and strain the milk and string the beans
and roll out biscuits with fingers stiff as claws--

not that I thought then much about it, but when
I did, at 12, I quit picking the berries, quit churning
the butter, quit running about the loveless house

on errands too painful for her legs and feet,
quit because I could not bear her hands’ and feet’s
deformities, when they most needed my legs and love--

before the strokes, before her speech was gone,
before the three pigs (going to the fair
to trick the wolf) and the wolf too were gone.
--Skating Rough Ground (Kelsay Press, 2022)
 
*****
 
The Day
 
The little room’s only window looked out
towards the ridgetop, the Dunkard church in the curve
of the two-lane, and, just beyond, the graveyard.

The morning sun sidled in past the partly
closed slats and resolved into rays and flecks
burning in the light—dust motes, I know,

and likely knew then, too, but still I watched
entranced one morning after our breakfast.
On this day I’d have otherwise forgotten,

probably my grannies were in the kitchen--
Emma with arms stretched out to read who’d died
(she’d be in the Dunkard cemetery soon),

half-crippled Sallie stringing the green beans
(years of suffering and strokes lay just ahead)--
while I stood quietly in the little room

watching the random sparkles in the sunbeam,
worlds I could move with a single breath
of poem or prayer, but could not control.
--Skating Rough Ground (Kelsay Press, 2022)
 
***** 

Visiting the Cemetery
 
She remembers a fragrant dog-rose--
how it hangs low, over the blackberry,
where goslings stroll to the water
and goose and gander are wary.

The breeze has a hint of carrion.
Perhaps that’s why it’s sighing.
A fox barks out a warning.
Something is always dying.
--Visions International (2016)
 
***** 
​
Tell me where all past years are
 
She had a broad lap, a feed sack apron.
We sat warming on the stoop,
and everything around falling
fell onto her sack, golden
catkins, chinquapin burs, pods
of locust sticky with their honey,
dust of stars, dust out of the furrows.
She hummed; I translate:

When will the time come back to me
when hours were in my pocket
as many and heavy as loose pennies,  
when days oozed thicker than
end-of-summer honey, when happiness
formed in my hands like butter from the churn
to squeeze and pat into a cake
and print with a petal crown of daisies?

Now we both are humming, sixty or more
years between renditions, and while
we sing the sun clocks out and the moon
on the ridgetop stands and shakes out its lap,
a glowing radium dial.
--Visions International (2022)


Posted and edited, 7 Sept 2025

A Solemn Air
August 2021
 
Among the shriveling August blossoms
the bees keep at it through the drought.
The dusty air is dry and solemn,

exhausted by the sun. The mottled jetsam
of the wrecked season drops all about
with the shriveled August blossoms.

The season’s gains and losses, totted in columns
of smoke and dust as after an army’s rout,
make the thick air dry and solemn

and make us long for an early autumn’s
chill rains and black nights to veil the doubts
shriveling the August blossoms.

In winter perhaps we will redo our sums
when earth’s and heavens’ lights are out
and crisp air refreshes us, turned dry and solemn.

We hope to wake to hope or some
kinder accounting for what pride has bought
among the shriveling August blossoms
where the air burns dry and solemn.
 
******
 
The bees keep at it through the drought
in the last blooms, too late for fruit or seed.
They are doing what they ought,

if instinct is a duty. From a tin spout
I water most days. The annuals recede,
but bees keep at it through the drought,

driven by sweet need. For this we laud
persistent nature, its toys that never need
reminding to do just what they ought,

but wind themselves up, tail to snout,
to sniff out prey, to pounce, and feed,
like bees that keep at it through the drought

inside dying blooms. Those who fought
for losing causes, striving to kill or bleed
in honor—did they do as they ought?

What if their sacrifice has come to naught?
Duty is an instinct, instincts lead
the bees to keep at it through the drought,
certain they are doing what they ought.
 
—Published by Heron Clan, 2023
 
  
Vermeer’s “The Little Street,” 1657-1995
 
It's almost as if Vermeer can be seen, amid the horrors of his age, to have been …
inventing the very idea of peace.—Lawrence Weschler, Vermeer in Bosnia
 
The colors of grass and trees, ordinary
greens, once cost dearly to achieve
in art. Take the vine climbing a wall
in Vermeer’s “Little Street.” I’ve seen it often--
once in DC, many times in prints. The leaves
breathe life to the red brick and the white-
washed masonry. They began as lead-tin-
yellow mixed with azurite, a green ore
turned blue by trickling water that fell
from gray skies. Avid for richer, deeper hues,
Vermeer bought lapis lazuli that came
by camelback and boat from Afghan mines.
He looked on the street and found it good.
His land was at peace, or at least between wars.

DC that day was also between wars.
Vermeer’s kneeling children drew my eyes--
the girl’s head and back turning away,
her body concealing the boy’s face and hands
and the game they play. In the doorway sits a woman
absorbed in needlework, her eyes also concealed
by the white brim of her bonnet. That day, I looked
on the little street and cried. I couldn’t
have said why perfection had that effect.
Later I wondered what the veiled eyes
of the woman and children he used as models
might have seen in the wars; whether Vermeer
meant, Healing and peace are on this little
street, if you have eyes to see. I wondered
about it still later when the Afghan women
abandoned by us had their eyes gouged out.
I didn’t want to see. But to look aside
is shameful. From afar I bear timid witness.
 
—Published by Kakalak, 2023

I’m writing on Father’s Day. My father has been dead since late 1977 and my mother is dying. She has entered hospice, with good days and bad days. She has kept her wits and her memories from the distant past and from yesterday. She eats little, sleeps a lot, and on her better days she wakes for a few hours ready to reminisce and joke. But these days are becoming fewer, the hours of conversation diminishing. She is a good patient, asking only that she be kept comfortable.

Since her first battle with lymphoma in 1994, and especially after the second, more serious lymphoma in 2002, she's been setting her affairs in order. In the last few years, she has gradually had to give up everything that gave her pleasure and fulfillment in life, and now she is eager to reunite with my father who died in 1977. Her mind is clear and, to the extent possible, she's going out on her terms.

In the last few days, new poems have come to me and old poems have presented themselves for revision; they are not strictly speaking about her, but about our common lot.

The death of someone we love invites us to consider the difficulties of existence, for believers as well as everyone else. I like poetry that does not conceal the fallenness of the world we live in, but I love poetry that honors and magnifies its imperfect beauty.

This revision reflects the malice we often see in the fallen world:

Cutlip
 
The cutlip minnow’s mouth
is designed for knocking out
the eyes of harmless passing fish
into a covered dish

as in our mouth the tongue
is adapted for the art--
agree to call it out as hellish--
of breaking lovers’ hearts:

Nature’s red in tooth
and verb, et cetera.
Eyes and hearts are both delish
in Life’s eatery.

The world may have its sharp edges, but Mom is at peace. As a child, she was walking home one evening when a giant fireball descended from the sky and seemed to land in the woods behind a ridge. She expected it to burst into flames. She ran home, frightened, thinking the end of the world had come. Now her end has come, and she is not frightened. She is eager to reunite with my father now dead almost 48 years. She does not want to be distracted from her purpose.

Times and customs change in a long life. In her more than 90 years, Mom must have written and received hundreds of letters, and until very recently she continued to send Christmas and birthday cards. She wondered why her younger grandchildren and great grandchildren hardly ever sent a card or letter, but I explained that it’s a custom the young have abandoned. She does appreciate their texts and likes to respond. She gave up emails some time ago; they were famous among her family for their terseness. One I received read something like this: “Madalene has died. The funeral is on Thursday.” Madalene was her sister. Her death was expected, we knew the church where the funeral would take place, so perhaps no more needed to be said.

I am old enough to have belonged to the end of the letter-writing era, and indeed my son and I still occasionally exchange letters. Here is a new poem about love letters, especially those written but not sent or received but not read, both paradigmatic for communication in our fallen world. Mom told me some years ago that she would destroy the letters exchanged with Daddy, but I don’t know if such is the case.
 
Dead Letters

Pronounced man and wife: one in a black top hat
and tails, the pale one dressed all in white.

Marry death and divorce life. Eat the apple
and the seeds, the crisp flesh white

as the edge of a stamp, the precisely scalloped
lace-trimmed tulle dress in white

on a letter that can’t be mailed: “Dear Rabbit, you were
my only, my heart, without you I bleed white.”

In time our vain longings will be over,
when Jesus says, The field is white--

go to it, angels in black top hats, snaths,
and scythes: swing blades and lay in swathes the white

stuff of fodder and bread, bedding and brooms,
fuel to heat hell by burning a hot white.

Sing first the blade, then the ear,
then the full corn shall turn white

as Queen Anne’s ruff collar, dandelion heads,
milk-thistle’s sap oozing milky white--

all scythed flat—and a sliced through letter
with its cancelled stamp on a field of white.*

It arrived at noon, was rubbished unread by night,
blooded passion now faded illegibly white.
 
         * The stamp images have been borrowed from Walter Benjamin.
 
Mom has communicated clearly and simply what she wants now—to be kept comfortable and to be allowed to slip away. When she was in the hospital, before being transferred to hospice, she made quite a few requests, some material—Involving property and vehicles; some more emotional, including the disposition of some items of sentimental value; and some practical, like taking out the trash and recycling. Her instructions were clear. We are endeavoring to carry them out. When we asked about important papers, she knew where they were.

A friend called me today and reminded me of something that I know too well—new losses deepen as they bring to mind old losses. Here is another new poem recounting (and fictionalizing somewhat) an incident from many years ago that I just heard about. The protagonist is my father, someone rarely far from my thoughts:

 
Life List
 
The black cherries were in fruit. The tops
of our two trees were thick with birds. We’d
never seen their like. The spyglass mislaid
somewhere in our rummage, I started up
the tree, but the birds scattered. I was raised
by Daddy to use the tools I had at hand,
to worry a problem like a redbone hound
     with a raccoon. I fired at noonday….

Subtle crest, yellow belly, a bandit’s
black mask, and red chevrons on her wingtips:
cedar waxwing, we found it in the book.
Would it have been better if I hadn’t?
Murdering a beauty did make me sad,
     but beauty made me have to look.

Finally, great events in our lives invite us to seek inner and outer quiet. Mom is now asleep most of the time or hovering between sleep and wakefulness. A few days ago, she was enjoying the chatter of her children in the room; now she has asked for quiet as she prepares for the journey.


Jaguar Preserve, Belize
 
The slick clay road,
the bone-white puddle
of butterflies on a tire-
flattened black toad:
 
we parked and walked.
Wings beat
around us as they rose
arresting talk.
 
Wings a hair’s breadth
from my lips
kept them from spewing words
on beauty and death.
 
 
Prufrock growing old dared wear his trousers with the bottoms rolled. As I grow older, I find I have the courage, or temerity, to speak of beauty, goodness, and truth without irony. If we are not here to increase our intimacy with the realities endorsing these terms, why are we here?

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? (Micah 6:8).


In our daily lives, practicing these virtues looks pretty humble: Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world. (Epistle of James 1:27)


Is not this the fast that I have chosen?
to loose the bands of wickedness,
     to undo the heavy burdens,
and to let the oppressed go free,
     and that ye break every yoke?
Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry,
     and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house?
when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him;
     and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?

Then shall thy light break forth as the morning,
     and thine health shall spring forth speedily:
and thy righteousness shall go before thee;
     the glory of the Lord shall be thy rearward [rearguard].

Then shalt thou call,
     and the Lord shall answer;
thou shalt cry,
     and he shall say, Here I am.
If thou take away from the midst of thee the yoke,
     the putting forth of the finger, and speaking vanity;
and if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry,
     and satisfy the afflicted soul;
then shall thy light rise in obscurity,
     and thy darkness be as the noon day:
and the Lord shall guide thee continually,
     and satisfy thy soul in drought,
     and make fat thy bones:
and thou shalt be like a watered garden,
     and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.
And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places:
thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations;
and thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach,
     The restorer of paths to dwell in. (Isaiah 58:6-12)
 
After retiring from as a speech therapist in the schools, Mom volunteered at a soup kitchen, a hospice, at church (she had a responsible position at the age of 80), and more. She lived a full life and now she is ready for the more abundant life that awaits. 

In February of last year, Norh Carolina poet and fiction writer Sally Thomas wrote a Substack post on Edward Thomas's poem, “February Afternoon.” She included a brief description of Thomas’s crucial friendship with Robert Frost:
 
“Frost’s own famous poem, ‘The Road Not Taken,’ was reportedly inspired by the two poets’ walks together during the American’s 1914 sojourn in England. Frost had intended the poem as a gentle poke at indecision generally, but also at Thomas in particular, as the latter debated within himself whether or not to enlist as a soldier. Frost, whose urging had prompted Thomas to write poetry in the first place, surely cannot have intended that his poem should make his friend’s mind up for him in the way that it appears to have done”—that is, to volunteer to fight in France, a decision that led to his death.

An earlier article, by Katherine Robinson ("Robert Frost: 'The Road Not Taken': Our choices are made clear in hindsight”):

"Soon after writing the poem in 1915, Frost griped to Thomas that he had read the poem to an audience of college students and that it had been 'taken pretty seriously … despite doing my best to make it obvious by my manner that I was fooling. … Mea culpa.’”

Robinson goes on to find a deeper meaning in the poem: in part, it's about the way we look back on our casual, even whimsical choices, and find in them meaningful decisions.

Lately, I've been reading and rereading Auden's 1955 collection, The Shield of Achilles, and I noticed a poem that views much of our decision-making as self-deception. The poem is, I would like to believe, a gloss on Frost’s poem—not an explanation so much as Auden’s serious joke in response to Frost’s.

In “A Permanent Way,” Auden imagines himself as a train traveler who sees landscapes with "Intriguing dales" that he might be tempted to explore. But, should he actually find himself “Where a foot-path leaves the pike // For some steep romantic spot,” he would get down to practicalities: would the path bring him a little money or familial affection?


     But, forcibly held to my tracks, 
     I can safely relax and dream 
     Of a love and a livelihood 
     To fit that wood or stream; 

     And what could be greater fun, 
     Once one has chosen and paid, 
     Than the inexpensive delight 
     Of a choice one might have made.
 
     --The Shield of Achilles (W.H. Auden: Critical Editions) (p. 33). Kindle Edition.
 
Like Frost, Auden is joking with a serious point: those who are well established on a “permanent way”—whose “good old train … jog[s] / To the dogma of its rails”—deceive themselves if they believe they can casually abandon it for “some steep romantic spot.”

[NOTE: Auden seems to be working effortlessly here, but note how the a b c b rhyme scheme is  enriched, as Auden often does: by a word in the middle of the second and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme with the last word in the first and third lines, for example:

     But, forcibly held to my TRACKS, 
     I can safely reLAX and dream
     Of a love and a liveliHOOD 
     To fit that WOOD or stream....] 
​
*****

But people do leave their seemingly permanent ways, their loved ones, their solitude, and their livelihoods. Our exhibit is Edward Thomas, who gave up a successful and influential, if not remunerative, career as a writer to enlist in the army, leaving behind a wife and three children. Because of his wife and children, he could have spent the war as a civilian, but he enlisted. Because of his age, he could have served in England, but he volunteered to go to the front, with its high death rate for officers.
 
His choices were obviously big decisions. A paper by Edna Ullmann-Margalit, “Big Decisions: Opting, Converting, Drifting” characterizes as big a type of decision that

• is transformative;
• is irrevocable;
• is taken in full awareness;
• leaves behind a lingering shadow in the choice not made.

[NOTE: The paper is available from several online sources. I downloaded it from the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a source I can no longer find online.]

By “transformative,” Ullman-Margalit means that big decisions “change one’s cognitive and evaluative systems. Inasmuch as our beliefs and desires shape the core of what we are as rational decision makers, we may say that one emerges from an opting situation a different person” (opting is her for making a big decision).

Such small decisions lead to transformation over time, the kind of decision made by Frost’s traveler: the effects of his choosing a path becomes evident only “ages and ages hence.” But Ullman-Margalit is focusing on decisions that lead to a “point of sharp discontinuity” in a life, “an abrupt transformation.”

Big decisions are irrevocable: “one is embarking upon a road that is one way only, leaving burning bridges behind. A reversal in the ordinary sense is impossible.” One has become a different person.

Big decisions are “taken in full awareness”: “[T]he person believes (a) that he or she must make a genuine choice between viable alternatives, and (b) that the decision they are called upon to make is ‘big’ – transformative and irrevocable.” Frost’s speaker is not aware of making that sort of decision; the diverging paths are quite similar. Auden’s speaker is aware that he has no real choice, though for a while he may entertain the fancy of choosing a different life.

Finally, the choice not made lingers in the consciousness: “[W]hat is of significance to the [chooser’s] account of his or her own life is not only the option they have taken, but also the one they have rejected: the person one did not marry, the country one did not emigrate to, the career one did not pursue. The rejected option enters in an essential way into the person's description of his or her life. The shadow presence maintained by the rejected option may constitute a yardstick by which this person evaluates the worth, success or meaning of his or her life.”

Frost’s traveler does, after a considerable period, look back with a sigh, but would not be able to define the rejected choice: it was just another path more or less indistinguishable from the chosen path. “Forcibly held to my tracks,” Auden’s speaker had no real choice, but that realization is comforting, not dismaying. He can “safely relax and dream,” protected from the risks of choice.

What makes Ullmann-Margalit’s paper so interesting to me is the discontinuity, the before and after of a big decision. (Here I will oversimplify and probably distort her paper.) Since the big decision by definition transforms the self, the basis of rational choice is different on each side of the discontinuity. How then can one rationally make a big decision? I am choosing to be another person (called the New Person by Ullman-Margalit) whose values and bases for evaluation I don’t share. 

“Picking” is defined by Ullman-Margalit as the type of decision one makes when the choice is meaningless and therefore not really a choice; for example, one picks a sixpack of Diet Coke from a shelfful of identical sixpacks. No grounds for preference exist; one might have picked any of them: “One chooses for reasons; one picks when reasons cannot prevail.” But the same condition exists for truly big decisions:

“These fundamental choices, then, cannot really be choices; so are they instances of picking? These are after all the biggest, in the sense of weightiest, decisions we may ever have to make. I believe that a similar intuition underlies Kant’s position about the free yet ultimately inscrutable act of choice ('Wilkuer') to adhere to the maxim of the universal moral law. I also believe that an intuition like this underlies the understanding of the absurd in the writings of Karl Schmidt and of the Existentialist thinkers, notably Heidegger and Sartre. At bottom, we make our most fundamental choices of the canons of morality, logic and rationality in total freedom and without appeal to reasons. They embody acts that this literature variously describes as nihilist, absurd, or leaps (of faith).”

Posted 30 May 2025; edited/corrected 3 June 2025. Send comments, questions, etc., to [email protected].

​Below are couplets I’ve translated from the French of Fernand Moutet, Pareil au Feu Couvert (Paris: Éditions Points & Counterpoints, 1970). He was a Provençal poet who died in 1993.


Your role is clear: against the window throw a stone,
Poet, and cry out that the sky has just been born.

*****

The kiss of Sappho, this mythic sun,
I know it well: Margot gave me one.

*****

Old man, sing again, we beg you: a beech
Struck by lightning burns with beautiful heat.

*****

The gods—invisible? Yes, but in his prison
The convict can still remember the horizon.

Posted 31 March 2025. Send comments to [email protected].

New Verse Review: A Journal of Lyric and Narrative Poetry “features work that renews the ancient affinities among poetry, song, and story.” The first issue was released in the summer of 2024. The founding editor is Steven Knepper, the Bruce C. Gottwald, Jr. ’81 Chair for Academic Excellence in the Department of English, Rhetoric, and Humanistic Studies at Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, VA. Knepper is also an associate editor for the Robert Frost Review, a writer of metrical poems, and author of books on two contemporary philosophers, William Desmond and Byung-Chul Han. NVR is a personal endeavor of the editor and is not affiliated with VMI.

Over the past few days, I have been reading the poems in the latest number, Winter 2025, with the goal of writing a brief appreciation. Here I will focus on the short lyric and narrative poems, excluding the translations, the excerpts from longer works, and the critical essay by Elijah Perseus Blumov, “The Iron Lyre: Poetry, Heavy Metal, and the New Sublime.” All told, approximately sixty-six poems by fifty-five poets fall within the scope of my appreciation.

As an appreciation, this essay is personal, from the standpoint of a practicing writer and reader of poetry with a growing attachment to formal poetry. I still read and write free verse, but often enough I will take a promising but unfinished free verse poem and turn it into formal verse. Writing becomes a sort of game, usually an entertaining one, though sometimes I want to knock over the board and send the pieces flying. The variety and richness of formal poetry in this issue of NVR introduce many new games and remind me of some I’ve neglected.

In reading these poems and in pondering my recent experiences in writing formal poetry, I’ve discovered that a given form is possessed of genius as much or more than the writer: the “extraordinary intellectual power” of a poem lies in the potential of its form. This power is especially obvious in a form like the sonnet that has been handed down through generations, gaining flexibility and expressiveness and offering many models of technique, tone, subject, and vision.

Formal Poetry in NVR

Since NVR is devoted to formal lyric and narrative poetry, I was not surprised to find many forms represented. For those interested in exploring these forms and learning their genius, a partial listing follows. I focus on meters, stanza forms, and occasionally theme.

Eight sonnets were featured in a recent email sampler from this issue: Katherine Gordon, "Aloe Vera" (Shakespearian); Ernest Hilbert, "Pitch Meeting for Dillinger Escape Plan Part Two" (see below); Amit Majmudar, "Look No Further" (a a b a c b c // e e f g g f); Lisa Barnett, "Kissing in Cars" (two seven-line stanzas, a b a c b b c // b d e d e g g); Claudia Gary, "Still Seventeen" (Shakespearian); Steven Searcy, "Too Easy to Remember" (a b b a c d d c e f g e g f); Zara Raab, "Washington, D.C., the National Archives" (a b a a b c a c // d e d e g g); Bethel McGrew, "Psalm of the Flood” (a b a b c d c d d e f e f g g).

In addition, I note "A Shimmer of Dust and Starlight” by Ned Balbo based on a probably apocryphal story about the cat that saved Henry Wyatt from starving to death in prison by bringing him pigeons. It is a love poem of a sort, with two turns and an unusual rhyme scheme (a b a b c c [c slant rhymes with b] // d d e // f g g f e).

To this list of sonnets I add, as sonnet-adjacent, the nonrhyming 14-line poem in blank verse by Debra Bruce, “You Are An Inspiration! (No, You!).” It ends with a stunning metaphor for an unwanted, unearned compliment: “a stranger's swimsuit behind on a hook / which might stay there all day—who wants to wear / what isn't hers?—so damp, so intimate.”

Ernest Hilbert’s sonnet, "Pitch Meeting for Dillinger Escape Plan Part Two," is about gangsters arrested after watching a movie where gangsters are watching a movie in which gangsters watch a movie, etc.—an exercise in virtual recursion reflected in the repeated end line rhymes-- about/about, these/these, too/too, forget it/get it.

Triolet--Robert W. Crawford, "On First Looking Into Hubble's Deep Field."  Triolets have eight lines; the first line is repeated twice, and the second line repeated once, accounting for five of the eight lines. The key task of the form is to make these repetitions work. Everything depends on the choice of the first two lines. Crawford’s triolet begins: "So much, so many multiples of many / That many has no meaning any more...."

I believe it’s accurate to say I began writing triolets in number after reading Amit Majmudar, What He Did in Solitary (Knopt), many sections of which begin with untitled triolets.

Rondeau--Jean L. Kreiling, “The Mail Carrier.”

In a recent “The Rusty Paperweight” (NVR’s monthly newsletter), Knepper indirectly encouraged the writing of rondeau in English by quoting a substack article by Victoria Moul: “The simpler, more everyday kinds of rondeau, however, ought not really to be much more challenging in English than a sonnet, a form which has of course been enthusiastically domesticated. The most common form of rondeau has three stanzas of five, four and six lines, with the first half of line one being repeated as an abbreviated half line at the end of the second and third stanzas.” But I would add that a rondeau’s fifteen lines have only two rhymes. If sonnets are difficult to write in English, as some reasonably claim, because of the paucity of rhymes, the rondeau is even more challenging—though perhaps not “much more” than a tight Petrarchan sonnet.

Kreiling makes effective use of her refrain, rather cryptic without the context—“she likes the nor.” She demonstrates it can be used in different syntactic structures, a useful lesson.

Two sestinas--Shome Dasgupta, “A Louisiana Sestina”; Thomas Allan Orr, “The Feast of St Thomas on the Winter Solstice.”

Terza rima--Barbara Lydecker Crane, “Reverberations.” A celebration of two migrants imprisoned (their Purgatorio) in Italy who make musical instruments—“viols, violins, and cellos”—from the cedar planks of “the bobbing boats” in which (their Inferno) they crossed the Mediterranean, instruments used in a performance of The Four Seasons (Paradiso).

Fourteeners--Sydney Lea, “Bloom.” To vary the hypnotic, mechanical effect that this meter is prone to, with a regular caesura after the fourth foot, the poet has arranged for the caesura often to fall after the third foot, once after the fifth foot, and once after both the second and fifth feet. Like the poem in dactyls and trochees discussed below, Lea’s poem demonstrates new possibilities for this meter.

Dramatic monologue—NVR contains at least two interesting dramatic monologues. Brian Brodeur, “Jones Very in the Parlor,” is in blank verse, while Kelly Scott Franklin, “The Ballad of Martha Hunt” is written without stanza breaks, in iambic pentameter, but like a ballad rhymes on every other line (a b c b).

Ekphrastic poems—Jianqing Zheng has two free verse poems on photos by Eudora Welty, “Hard Times (Cherita)” and “Waiting” (many lines here lean into iambic). Two poems on objects seem to me to be in the ekphrastic spirit: Fr. Ryan Sliwa, “The Nikon” (free verse) and Cameron Brooks, “Pickup Smells” (blank verse).

Shaped poem--Amit Majmudar, “To His Phone,” is a terrific shaped poem about the amputation of our experience of life by the “prosthetic fantasies” offered by our phones. The shape of the poem graphically demonstrates the conclusion: “The hand that holds you has me by the neck.”

“To His Phone” and Majmudar’s sonnet mentioned above, “Look No Further,” reflect the screen-based virtual reality we currently inhabit. I’ve already mentioned Hilbert’s sonnet featuring gangster films on our oldest screen, the movie screen. This issue of NVR has other poems working this vein. Alex Rettie, “That Seventies Poem,” a poem in rhyming five-line stanzas of trochaic tetrameters (a a b b c // c d d e e // f f g g h // h i i j j), is about watching hockey game on TV as a family. In Daniel Patrick Sheehan’s “The Particular Judgment,” the Book of Life is projected onto a screen: “In the screen of flames above the golden throne / I saw the drab unfolding of my life.” Sheehan’s poem is in quatrains of iambic pentameter lines rhyming a b b a.

"Stakes," by Alice Allen, is a narrative in blank verse set among "these Christians who were experts / on everything Joss Whedon used to do" and given to long, inconclusive theological disputes over "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel." Can poetry redeem us from our addiction to little screens?

Narratives in quatrains constitute an important form in this issue. Examples include, Clarence Caddell, “Family Reunion” (iambic pentameter quatrains, rhyming a b a b); Jane Blanchard, “Eventuality” (iambic tetrameter quatrains, generally rhyming a b c b) ; Felicity Teague, “Chess with Jimmy” (iambic pentameter quatrains, rhyming a b a b); and Seiji Hakui, “Dream of an Old Fox (Based on a Folk Tale)” (ballad stanza, iambic tetrameter lines alternating with trimeter, rhyming a b c b. Many lines begin with trochees).

More Extended Comments on Poems

Finally, I’d like to discuss some poems I particularly enjoyed. It’s a somewhat arbitrary list, since I could list many more here.

Steven Searcy, “The Working World.” The poem has two nine-lines stanzas that rhyme with each other; that is, the corresponding lines in each stanza rhyme:

     a b c d e f g h i
     a b c d e f g h i

The lines are basically iambic, but the number of feet vary per line; the lines in the second stanza tend to be longer than those in the first. More interesting to me are the numerous internal rhymes, the alliteration, and the tone. The first four lines of the second stanza are illustrative:

     The uncurled petals of noon will change,
     but not too soon—the sky seeps song, long logs
     are laid in shade, and every feather
     finds the slot where it ought to be.

It is an unusual and refreshing nature poem.

Alfred Nicol, “Wretched Rocco.” My favorite teacher in college, Arthur Henry King, once told a class that the predominant emotion he discerned in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar was the joy of the young poet—he was not yet 30—in his creativity and mastery. I don’t know Nicol’s emotions on writing this poem, but I do sense that kind of joy as I read it.

The poem strikes me as having been written in a defined form, but I confess to not being able to identify the form. It is highly repetitive, rhythmically driven, and just plain fun, like many of the poems of Clément Marot. Throughout the poem, the first, second, fifth, and eighth lines are in iambic pentameter and end in Rocco. In each stanza, those same lines are almost identical, but words can be switched out so long as the new word rhymes with the deleted word. The remaining lines are tetrameter; lines three and four rhyme, as do lines six and seven. Here’s the first stanza:

     There'll be no place for you, pesky Rocco.
     They'll lose all trace of you, nudgy Rocco.
     Too many angels on a pin--
     they won't be squeezing tomcats in.
     There'll be no place for you, nudgy Rocco.
     They'll want to fold their wings and rest;
     you're an unwelcome little pest.
     There'll be no place for you, nudgy Rocco.

Wherever he may be, Christopher Smart’s cat Jeoffry must be enjoying the poem, though the fate of Rocco and the poet are sobering: “We'll have to pay for our mistakes. / Let's see how long forever takes.”

Jared Carter, “Andromeda” and “Sickle.” Though I’ve never written a successful poem in the form of Carter’s two short poems, I’m particularly fond of it: quatrains with the first and third lines in iambic tetrameters, the second and fourth lines in iambic dimeter. “The Sickle” ends in an amazing simile; the poet’s father handled a sickle

     … like a man waving a snake
        at a meeting 
     In a tent, out in the canebrake,
        God entreating.

Christopher Childers, “O Holy Night,” written in five quatrains. The overriding meter is dactylic/trochaic. The 1st and 3rd lines of each stanza have six poetic feet (hexameter), the 2nd and 4th lines have four (tetrameters).

Here’s the second line of the poem--

     SCAT-tered on / PRES-by-/TER-i-an /BENCH-es.

The same meter, alternating dactyls and trochees, is used in Whitman’s famous line:

     OUT of the / CRA-dle / END-less-ly / ROCK-ing

Childers is the translator and editor of the recently published Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse (March 2024), a remarkable achievement.

Like many poems here, this one opens up for me the possibility of using a meter I’ve never tried.

Conclusion that Does Not Conclude

NVR is my favorite poetry journal at the moment; I highly recommend it both to readers and practicing poets.

In thinking about my own modest achievements in poetry, and how often the achieved work falls short of ambition, I recall a few lines from a French poem by Rilke, “The Fruit Carrier” (“La Porteuse de Fruits”) where the carrier addresses the fruit:

     the winters imagined you, calculated you,
     in the roots and under the bark of the trunks
     (by lamplight).
     But you are probably more beautiful
     than all those plans, o you, the beloved works.

The poets in NVR may not have achieved all they aimed for, but the ambition, the craft, and the quality are impressively high.

Questions? Corrections? Complaints? Send them to [email protected]

Posted 24 March 2025

​Katie Nordt LaRosa, 2014

Winter Beeches
When cold sun sifts down through the understory,
the beech leaves glow, like a brown-winged miller
that hovers round the street lamp and beats the powder
from its wings. This light is the modest glory
of our winter. On work days, when we speed
distracted here and there, we may not notice.
But walk near in the fog, half-past the solstice--
in February, when peepers start to breed:
the glow will draw us through the backlit haze
into an ashen spring. Now I think of this
half light in the August heat, as Joe-pye’s
pink clouds smolder in the ditch and days
are growing shorter; as the lake’s cool mist
clings to the pines and mutes the sun’s slow rise.
     --Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. VII: North Carolina (Texas A&M Press, 2015); Mouth Work (St Andrews University Press, 2016)

Grass Cracks
​grass cracks
under my boots
tears blow into my eyes

the man
I might have been
dreaming about me--

a vast iron sky
a field of terse stubble
feeding one crow
     Mouth Work (St Andrews University Press, 2016)

​crow in the white oak
eyeing the empty field
as if he owned it
—Inspired by Issa


night rain
a crow caws
from far away


crow caws
shaking the tree
night rain falls again

Posted 2 Feb 2025. Send comments to [email protected]

vi

winter pond
low sun’s
ricochets of light


low sun
even the water
in the culvert glows


nothing is lost
sunlight of 1960
aflame on the hearth


Journal entry, 29 January 2010: “Duke Gardens: Winter jasmine is starting to bloom by the dry fish pond. Two quarreling geese abruptly make up at sunset & paddle together.”

The Sun of Austerlitz, 2 December 1895
“[Napoleon] looked now at the Pratzen Heights, now at the sun floating up out of the mist. When the sun had entirely emerged from the fog, and fields and mist were aglow with dazzling light—as if he had only awaited this to begin the action—he drew the glove from his shapely white hand, made a sign with it to the marshals, and ordered the action to begin. The marshals, accompanied by adjutants, galloped off in different directions, and a few minutes later the chief forces of the French army moved rapidly toward those Pratzen Heights which were being more and more denuded by Russian troops moving down the valley to their left.”--Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (p. 439), translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude. Global Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Callimachus, Epigram 34
When I heard, Heraclitus, you were dead,
I thought of all the suns we’d talked to bed
those nights, and the tears came. Dear guest, I know
that you were ashes long and long ago,
and yet your nightingales are singing still:
Death kills all things, but them he cannot kill.
 
Translated by Christopher Childers, The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse (p. 280). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Malachi 4:2
 
"But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall."


Posted 27 January 2025. Send comments to [email protected]