Friday, April 27, 2007

poets, essayists, and eye candy



Wow. Bret Lott, I love you, man. The Southern Review is publishing my two favorite poets, together, in the same issue. Is this rare? Consider that neither poet has published a volume of work. To catch their poems, you would first have to know when and which journal they might appear and then you ante up for one, maybe two poems. I have in my possession only three of Margo Berdeshevsky’s, xeroxed. I’m luckier with Allison Smythe. She is a longtime friend and critique partner and I am the blessed recipient of many more delicious lines and in the know on all her acceptances. Still. Having them both in one fine journal (and able to say I’ve shaken the hand of the editor) well, that is both rare and fine.

Another friend and nonfiction critique partner, Lisa Ohlen Harris, recently gifted a book to me by a writer of essays that she promised was near as good as reading Annie Dillard. I had my doubts. A slim volume, The Green Heart of the Tree, by A. S. Woudstra, is a compilation of essays written at a bamboo desk on the northwestern coast of Africa. I love these essays. Every word. I hesitate to tell you anything at all about them for fear you might presume familiarity and not buy this book. But these are some of the best essays I’ve read in a very long time. I love an intelligent and sensitive narrator; one who is well-traveled, understanding, a conduit by which I see and taste the red dust of her dirt road. Oh please buy this book. It is deliciously good.

And now for some deliciously good eye candy, revel in what Spring brought to us two weeks ago and only thirty minutes south of Dallas. It beat my beloved Washington-on-the Brazos annual retreat outside of Houston, though I missed meandering those paths with old friends.






Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Primaries








The world is exploding in color and vibrancy and I cannot possibly keep up. I'm three or four blogs behind, with news and muse vying for attention, pushed to the back burner to stew some more because the immediacy of Spring will not, cannot wait. The birds have my attention these days (you'd think I've never before seen the siren red of a cardinal) but lore says a pair of them brings love into your life. Along with rock doves, black-capped chickadees, bluejays, and mockingbirds, the cardinals' songs serenade and woo us. Rarer stil the pair of shy mallards down the creek and the brief reign of the wisteria, though no sign of the racoon or egret or hawk from last year.



Spring is clarifying: The pollen and dust washed away by the rains; the newly clothed trees rocked by March winds; the world once again able to breathe with new-leaf oxygen. In these moments, the fog lifts from a depressed stupor, my eyes come into focus, and I live in the urgent now. Look to the ant, to the damselfly, the rabbit, the moon.