Chapters (6)

no roof caved in from the weight of snow as happened in 1924 only

another thump as a slab of snow lets loose leaving my roof

gleaming in the wet residue it takes what it needs

from the lifesource and sheds the rest a useful

example if I were starting over

STORM

one minute a slender pine indistinguishable from the others

the next its trunk horizontal still green the jagged stump

a nest for the flickers

one minute high wind and rain the skies

lit up the next a few bright winking stars the lashing of the brook

one minute an exaltation in the apple trees the shadblow trees

the next white trash on the ground new birds

or the same birds crowding the feeder

one minute the children were sleeping in their beds

you got sick you got well you got sick

the lilac bush we planted is a tree the cat creeps past

with something in her mouth she’s hurrying down to where

the culvert overflowed one minute bright yellow

marsh marigolds springing up the next

the farmer sweeps them into his bales of hay

Praise for Ellen Bryant Voigt

“Reading Voigt, one comes to understand that what we think of as reality is the product of both painstaking observation and imagination. . . . She favors a language that is both precise and lush, and a narrative that is both immediately accessible and richly layered with meaning.”

—Charles Simic, New York Review of Books

“Voigt’s . . . commitment to the syntactic energies that Frost once called ‘the abstract sound of sense’ lends presence and dynamism to [her] primary subjects. She has always been obsessed with forging some link between the living and the dead, and with making a home in a natural world that she sees, shifting her cold eye, as both beautiful and fatal.”

—Peter Campion, Poetry

“‘Hard’ and ‘contemplative’ apply to the adamant and reflective nature of Voigt’s own genius. She is a poet of knowledge, and knowledge in the living, messy world.”

—Robert Pinsky, Washington Post Book World

“Ellen Bryant Voigt’s gift is the elegy, cool and direct as rain. . . . Poems passionate but disciplined sing line by line.”

—National Book Award for poetry, finalist citation

“Ellen Bryant Voigt has fashioned an art of passionate gravity and opulent music, an art at once ravishing and stern and deeply human.”

—American Academy of Arts and Letters, Academy Award in Literature citation

“The beauty and intensity of Ellen Bryant Voigt’s sustained elegy [in Kyrie] leaves us feeling much as we do after listening to Mozart’s Requiem: grief-stricken, transformed, and exalted.”

—Francine Prose

Copyright

First published as a Norton paperback 2015

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