Into the Good World Again: Poems - Softcover

Garland, Max

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1737405105 ISBN 13: 9781737405108

Publisher: Holy Cow! Press, 2023

Synopsis

In these unsettling pandemic times, former Wisconsin Poet Laureate Max Garland offers poems of grace, resilience, and healing remembrance.

These are poems of remembering, not only the anguish and isolation of the global pandemic, during which most were written, but also remembering as a creative or restorative force. Max Garland’s poems walk on a wire of remnant faith that even in the news-glutted age of social media, there’s a role for poetry, “...news that Stays news,” as one poet put it nearly a century ago. There’s an evocative range: from the surrealistic conjurings of a child’s mind at bedtime, to the fragmented memory of an aging widow, struggling to recall the details of her life, or if not the details, at least the emotional truth of that life, realizing that for her, “Memory is more like poetry than poetry.”

About this title

About the Author

Max Garland’s previous award winning books include The Word We Used for It, The Postal Confessions, and Hunger Wide as Heaven. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Michener Foundation, the Bush Foundation, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories, among many other awards. Born and raised in western Kentucky, where he worked for many years as a rural letter carrier on the route where he was born, he later attended the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and is the former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin. He lives in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From "Social Distancing":

Say there came a pandemic; some newsdrunk virus
set its hooks in us. And only the sky for a nurse,
arced and empty and barely even blue.

And only the musical pulse, and the several senses
for consolation, except for a stream of distant words
like waves bearing the rush, curl, and foam of elsewhere

arriving, the distant rhythm of others to bridge the gap
between head and heart, dark and day, fear, and whatever
it is one feels on the brink of

when walking next to great waters, how the surf catches
and releases the light, and the waves and bones tremble
like the distant cousins of constant thunder.

We know salt tumbles eventually from ocean to body
and back, and forth. We know it takes ages to regather
the shaken self into the good world again

Edition details

• Publisher: Holy Cow! Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1737405105
• ISBN 13: 9781737405108
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 86