FREE POETRY

to a good home....
Received in the mail several copies of Free Poetry, a series of chapbooks edited by Boise State University’s Martin Corless-Smith. The books aren’t copyrighted, and they are distributed gratis. They can be reproduced and shared with any and all readers.

Poets in the series include Paul Hoover, Geraldine Monk, Alan Halsey and Cole Swensen.

Jeremy Hooker
Reflections on Ground & Seventeen Poems, a 2005 collection from Jeremy Hooker, includes his eloquent “Curlew,” which you can also listen to at www.poetryarchive.org :
Curlew
The curve of its cry—
A sculpture
Of the long beak
A spiral carved from bone.
It is raised
      quickening
From the ground,
Is wound high, and again unwound,
      down
To the stalker nodding
In a marshy field.
It is the welling
Of a cold mineral spring,
Salt from the estuary
Dissolved, sharpening
The fresh vein bubbling on stone.
It is an echo
Repeating an echo
That calls you back.
It looses
Words from dust till the live tongue
Cry: This is mine
Not mine, this life
Welling from springs
Under ground, spiraling
Up the long flight of bone.
* * * * * * * * * * * *

Sally Keith
Also in the series, Sally Keith's 2008 sequence On the Painting of the View, which begins:
I.
I could not make hin come to me. A dozen times
the fresco dried before I made the face, the face
I'd kiss, my father, standing in the middle
of the marsh, the wind slung low at his feet,
one pink hand against his hip.
We'd met again in early spring. Dead trees rose
like sticks where eventually owls would nest.
The flowers were purple tufts.
The flowers struck us like props.
We were there and not there all at once.
Red swans were gliding in random patterns
knocking their plumage against
one another and occasionally dipping their beaks
breaking the viscous sheen.
We'd gone beneath the leaves so that the rain
never got to us. We knew how it felt—
this feeling before a dream,
knowing a thing we could never touch.
* *
If you're interested in getting copies of Free Poetry, write to Martin Corless-Smith at [email protected]