I am so thrilled to share with you one of my poems, “Magic” from Love &Metaxa. There are 104 poems in this poetry book.

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Hannah VanderHart wrote me this wonderful blurb for Love & Metaxa. Hannah VanderHart lives in Durham, North Carolina. She holds an MFA in poetry from George Mason University and an MA in English from Georgetown, where she worked with Carolyn Forché at the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. In 2019, she received her PhD in English from Duke University and defended the dissertationGender and Collaboration in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry. Her poetry, reviews, and essays have appeared inPoetry Daily,The Boston Globe,Kenyon Review,American Poetry Review.

She is the author of the poetry chapbookHands like Birds(Ethel Zine Press,2019) and the poetry collectionWhat Pecan Light(forthcoming fromBull City Press, Spring 2021). Her works-in-progress include the poetry collectionLarksand the essay collectionConfederate Monument Removal. Hannah is the reviews editor atEcoTheo Review

The clue to the subject of David Bleiman’s debut collection is in the title, This Kilt of Many Colours, (Dempsey and Windle, 2021) for this remarkable, thought-provoking pamphlet explores the complexities of identity – the many elements and influences that make us who we are symbolised in the weave of the tartan.

For Bleiman, identity is influenced by a number of factors. One of these factors is history. Though we may know little about our ancestors’ past, he suggests we can feel an inexplicable connection with them. He asks in El impacto del olvido ‘Why, when the black-bearded guide/sings the song of a Jewish girl in Ladino/and the tongues of every foreign sailor who used her in those days in Salonika, why do I start to cry?’ Though he has no personal connection with the events in the song other than shared ancestry, the words elicit a deep ‘yearning’…

Louise Glück, in her essay Invitation and Exclusion^[1], argues for poetry that requires a listener or a reader rather than that which is merely overheard, contrasting Eliot, whose ‘cri du coeur craves a listener who becomes, by virtue of his absorption, [the poet’s] collaborator’ with Wallace Stevens: ‘Stevens’ meditative poems are not addressed outward; they are allowed to be overheard’.  Some readers regard the work of W.S. Graham, with its enduring preoccupation with language, as metapoetry, exclusive because it is concerned with the writing of poetry, rather than with the world.  This is very far from the truth as can be demonstrated from an analysis of The Nightfishing, pivotal in the poet’s career. Graham’s poem is about the sea, about the real sea, ‘a grey green sea, not a chocolate box sea’, a poem which he hoped would make ‘somebody seasick ( a good unliterary measurement)’;^[2] it is…