Raking the Winter Leaves: New and Selected Poems

Award-winning poet Gary Margolis gathers four books of poetry in Raking the Winter Leaves: New and Selected Poems, including a selection of poems from his new collection, The Other Flag. These poems speak from the heart of New England and our nation, from the worldly places and habitats, stripped by war and the heated climate of politics. They speak in a style familiar to his readers of almost fifty years with thoughtful feeling, humor, curiosity and the surprises to which following the threads of a poem's unexpected, yet inevitable, language can suggest and provide. As he writes in Consider Yourself, As a rule stones will sing, Give what you can, what there is to give, what you have been given, these poems fold in and blossom, bring us to a falling night and rising day.

Table of Contents

NEW POEMS
To the Redwings
The End of Football
At Matanzas Inlet, Florida, after Driving to Midway Airport
After School Working, Boston, 1963
Fishing a Pair of Sunglasses off the Net Behind Home Plate on PatriotsTom Verner Shows Us a Trick
Finishing the Term
What It Is We Have to Write
Packing for Eternity
Raking the Winter Leaves
from The Day We Still Stand Here (1982)
August
Geese Overhead
Passions of the Flowering Apple
I Am Ordered to Go and Say So Long
During the War
Stateside
I Appraise the Probability of Improving
Her Room
The Carver
Ananda's Talk with Buddha
Back
Town Meeting
Knock Back
Pearl of the Moon
Slow Words for Shoreham and the Apple Blossom Derby
Away from Any Uniform
For the Woman at the Fast-Food Fish Place Who Called Me Pig
The Two-Hundred-Pound Potato Chip
The Hand of Peace
There
In January Everything That Can Break Breaks Down
If You Asked
Dancing at Bread Loaf
Falling Awake
Prayer for My Son Asleep with His Sword
The Two of Us
Away from Us
Reading the Night
How We Know We're Here
from Fire in the Orchard (2002)
Dead Creek
Road Lulav
The Burning Bush of Basketball
Night Call to You and the Wind of Chernobyl
Here, Pepi
The Boss's Son
A Shadow of a Nest
Fire in the Orchard
In Audubon's Notebook
The Happy Net
Nothing Else We Had to Share
Shovel and Rake
Fall Term
To the Young Woman Looking for an Eating Disorder Workshop Who Found a Poetry Reading Instead
Civil Union and the Breeze
This Forever
Reunion
from Below the Falls (2010)
State of My Nation Address
What We Thought We Said and Saw
Shout-out
The Missing
Snow Day
After the Fact
Dylan in Vermont
Before the Election
For Hospice Volunteers
Conjugating March
Raising a Banner in the Garden
Young Man with the Unwanted Thought
A Tide is Hard to Please
Snow and Ash
Walking across the Fairway
Foreclosure
Below the Falls
Happy New Year 3008
His Own Ground

GARY MARGOLIS is the author of four books of poems, Below the Falls, Fire in the Orchard, Falling Awake, and The Day We Still Stand Here. His memoir, Seeing the Songs: A Poet’s Journey to the Shamans in Ecuador, is recently published. He is Executive Director Emeritus of College Mental Health Services at Middlebury College where he was also a part time Associate Professor of English and American Literatures. A recipient of Vermont Arts Council and Millay Colony Awards, and a Robert Frost Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, his poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, American Scholar, Poetry Northwest, and the Journal of the American College Health Association. He has taught at the Bread Loaf, University of Tennessee and University of Vermont Writers’ Conferences. Dr. Margolis was awarded the Sam Dietzel Award for mental health practice in Vermont by the clinical psychology department of Saint Michaels College and the Covey Community Award by the Counseling Service of Addison County. He lives with his wife, Wendy Lynch, in Cornwall, Vermont.