Miscellany: Jackley, Gilbert, Gregg, Merwin & the Lilliput Archive

Cover by Harland Ristau

Mark Jackley, who has contributed some great work to Lilliput Review, has a new collection of poems out, entitled Cracks and Slats, from Amsterdam Press, part of the pertly named Gob Pile Chapbook Series. Here's a neat little poem from that collection, one of the endless variations in poetry on immortalizing a loved one:

Poet and Daughter

I am my words,
ink and pixels,

you my link
to eternity,

the bright and vast
intensity

of the
empty page.

Mark Jackley

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I can't remember where I ran across this enjoyable reading from the 90's by a Lilliput favorite, Jack Gilbert, along with Linda Gregg:





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Just now, while reading over some of W. S. Merwin's latest from The Shadow of Sirius, have learned that he has won the Pulitzer Prize, much deserved I think. The following is from that collection, from which I've featured two other poems previously:

Lake Shore in Half Light

There is a question I want to ask
and I can't remember it
I keep trying to
I know it is the same question
it has always been
in fact I seem to know
almost everything about it
leading me to the lake shore
at daybreak or twilight
and to whatever is standing
next to the question
as a body stands next to its shadow
but the question is not a shadow
if I knew who discovered
zero I might ask
what there was before

W. S. Merwin

If you bought one book of poetry this year, you probably couldn't do much better than this fine collection continuing a remarkable poetic journey.


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2009 is the 20th anniversary of Lilliput Review and the archive countdown to issue #1 will, if it continues on its current one-posting-per-week pace, finish up sometime in early 2010. This week's feature issue is #38 from October 1992, with a cover by the late great Harland Ristau. Themed as duos and trios, each page contained poems related in groups of two or threes. Here's a couple of poems that grab me today, 17 years later:




chimney smoke
mingling with mist and snow
evening

Jonas Winet

Postcard

A light wet snow
waters the back yard.
I watch from the sofa.
I miss your small hands.

Bart Solarczyk

learn to love/ then learn to
lose what you love/ learn to
lose love/ learn to love/ to
lose/ learn/ love

Coral Hull

she comes home
still pissed
lets in a fly

William Hart

swatting a fly
looking at
a mountain

Issa
translated by David Lanoue

best,
Don