And with this, we’ve exhausted the Payday Poetry submissions except for a couple of FOB Bible poems that we’ll get to at some point. So if you have a bit of free time here in the lazy days of summer, poke around the internet (esp. Dialogue and Sunstone) and come up with some new submissions.
Title: Cricket (so what you do is click on this link, click on search inside, and click on First Pages)
Poet: Philip White
Publication Info: The Clearing (Walt Mcdonald First-Book Series in Poetry); 2007, Texas Tech University Press
Submitted by: Tyler Chadwick
Why?: Tyler says: The link is to Amazon’s “Look Inside!” page for White’s first collection, The Clearing. “Cricket” is the book’s first poem (just click on the “First Pages” link) and establishes the main theme of the book (as I understand it): that the dead don’t come back, but that tragedy and death can be life-affirming, something signaled in “Cricket” by the poet’s heightened experience with the senses, especially hearing, which allows him to connect in some way to the past and to live/feel deeply in the present.
Wm adds: also see Margaret Young’s AML blog post on The Clearing.
Participate:
Here’s the link to the spreadsheet so you can see what’s already been submitted
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This is a striking poem. I’m not sure a poem’s ever made me feel that cold before.
And the segue into the returning dead was masterfully done — that’s a very easy subject to screw up. But details like the sound ground it and make it true.
I thought it was a lovely poem.
Throughout the whole of The Clearing, White does that: grounds his grief in the sound of the line and in the details of life lived under pain of love. In this light, “Cricket” sets up the argument of the collection well.
I have never seen a poem like that before. I was amazed in what I read. It is so hearth warming poem. I will going to share this to my wife and I will sure she will feel the same.