The Tuesday Poem this week is a short, bloody poem which will stay in your dreams. By US poet Stephen Crane (1871-1900) it is called In the Desert and has been selected by NZ poet Janis Freegard. The 30 poets on the blog roll have filed their usual feast of poems that both 'eat hearts' like the protagonist of In the Desert and converse with the hub poem in stimulating ways. This week the poems appear to emphasise lightness/the ephemeral versus heaviness/the corporeal. US poet Lori Leigh's Inside and poems by NZer Tim Jones' (The Wrong Horse) and Alicia Ponder's on the US oil spill are very much the latter, two poems with ghosts (including one short quote about Odysseus and his mother) in the former. The coming together of the two elements occurs in poems by first-time Tuesday Poet Aucklander Elizabeth Welsh, and another by Dunedin poet and artist Claire Beynon.
There are also some surprising poems about children - by NZers Zireaux and Kay McKenzie Cooke, and another by a Victorian poet selected by Harvey McQueen - all so different from one another but resonating with the same energy. And there is so much more besides at Tuesday Poem - a poem called A Prayer, Browning's My Last Duchess, Epithalamium NYC by Anne Carson ... but home is as good a place as any to end a Tuesday Poem viewing. There is one centred around fear of the dark (Kathleen Jones), and another by Helen Rickerby alight with love of person and place. If you're a Wellingtonian, you'll feel very at 'home' watching this poem (it's in video form) - from the start of the steep path that leads to the house, it's no mistaking where we are.
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