Maryann Corbett, "Mid Evil" at LWoM

Lady Word of Mouth is pleased to announce a new page featuring poet Maryann Corbett's book of poems, Mid Evil. The collection came out some months ago, having won the Richard Wilbur Award. See Mid Evil here. The great Lady needs minions, servitors, and willing hearts to share the word!

Lady Word of Mouth

New at Lady Word of Mouth:

MaryAnn Corbett, Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter

poetry

Gary Dietz, Dads of Disability

essays, memoir, and a smattering of poetry

and a new edition of 

Scott G. F. Bailey's The Astrologer

novel

Lady Word of Mouth

announces Maryann Corbett's Breath Control. Go pay her a visit, will you?

Corbett, "Sacred Harp Convention"

Progeny shenanigans are underway. My husband, having gone to Mt. Katahdin with a load of Scouts, turned around and zipped to North Carolina to fetch no. 1. And today I am washing for no. 3's departure... (No. 2 must stay home and work.)

So here's a poem not mine, as my "free" time has been devoted to award reading and housecleaning this weekend. It's by Maryann Corbett, from Breath Control (David Robert Books, 2012), which I plucked up while at West Chester Poetry Conference for a couple of days.

I picked this one in honor of that quick trip to Carolina and my mother, who sent up a chest of green peanuts and fresh black eyes (or lady peas or purple hulls or something--can't wait to see.) And it's Sunday on the porch down South, so here goes:

Sacred Harp Convention

Don't let it fool you. The careful Southern manners,
the primly white-walled church in its Baptist plainness,
the rigid etiquette of the square of singers--
nothing is tame here, nothing without its dangers.
Certainly not the sound. Tone like a bray,
pitch and tuning a bristle of disagreement,
dynamic range from freight train to tsunami.
You don't hear this: you quail before its power.
The fourths and fifths of its harmonies opening like jaws.
The words lying in wait for the unsuspecting--
all that wandering, all those wayfaring strangers,
everyone leaving, bound for the promised land--
and now the teeth of its meaning close on your throat
and drag you to earth: you're choked, you're stupidly sobbing,
remembering your dead, so that the alto beside you,
whose voice has already rasped away your defenses,
goes quiet and settles an arm around your shoulder.

If you don't know what sacred harp is, fly here.

Readings for the 12 Days of Christmas: Mezzo Cammin

I stayed up till 3:00 working on a promised Anglo-Saxon translation and talking with my daughter, and now must finish cleaning the remains of the flood--in-laws are due tomorrow. So for today's 12 Days of Christmas reading I shall quickly pilfer some poems from that lovely online venue, Mezzo Cammin, edited by Kim Bridgford and featuring formal poems by women.

Enjoy!

Maryann Corbett

Fist

It looks like knucklebones, the way the lines
fist up in fours, each rhyme a hardened stud
under a leather glove. Or meat-fork tines.
You stab with them; the puncture holes ooze blood.

It's built for doing damage. It's compact.
It lays its weapons down in ordered rows,
puts on its ninja costume, silk and black
and disciplined, adopts its kung fu pose,
waits. Is silent.

*************Then it whirls around,
flips on its superpowered X-ray glance,
and THWACK! your nemesis is on the ground.
(And, God, the satisfaction when he lands.)

You feel like watching someone's entrails twist?
Write one of these. A sonnet is a fist.


Jennifer Reeser


from Sonnets from the Dark Lady

1

In the old age black was not counted fair,. . .

The world knows black as universal sin.
No Paris stylist passionately swearing
The chic are rendered chicer, thin more thin,
Persuades the bon vivant into its wearing.
In black, the child is chased away, affection
And understanding, though it clothe demurely;
Compassion, color run from the complexion.
But since life thrives through compromises, surely
Let raven, sable, rook be my disguise.
Make murk my brow, in ashes root my hair,
That while I live, none but my master's eyes
May gain one aureole to find me fair,
And thereby--in fair finding--obfuscate
My mirror's counter and uncountered mate.


Barbara Crooker


Stone Fruit (A Sevenling)

Now they come in, all at once:
peaches, nectarines, plums; thin skins
that can barely hold the fruit, the juice.

But what I'm hungry for is cold soup:
cucumber with dill and yogurt, fiery gazpacho,
velvet avocado, with a curl of shrimp on top.

And at the heart of all flesh, a pit.


Annie Finch

Elegy for Her Mother

For K.V.

When your mother joined October,
took the questions from the earth
with her body, left you shining
with your answers, how did earth
close around her? Was it startled

by a further laugh of grain?
Did a field of hard earth open
over her, till she was grain?

Was she brought to flame again
in the mothers' month, October,
when the dead come closing in?
Was she made to a green flame
by a further laugh of grain?

Did a field of hard earth open
over her, till she was grain?
Was she brought to flame again?