This is a collection of poems dealing with grief, loss, and love. Rooted in the natural world. Poems in simple language but with deep feeling.
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Beverly Voigt is a native Pittsburgher, currently living in Los Angeles. Her poems have been published in Crab Creek Review, Sonora Review, Friends of Acadia Journal, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Woman of Salt was published in 2018 by Seven Kitchens Press.
FLP POETRY BOOK OF THE DAY: Song of the Overcast by Beverly Voigt
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Beverly Voigt is a native Pittsburgher, currently living in Los Angeles. Her poems have been published in Crab Creek Review, Sonora Review, Friends of Acadia Journal, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Woman of Salt was published in 2018 by Seven Kitchens Press.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Song of the Overcast by Beverly Voigt
Song of the Overcast is Beverly Voigt’s second chapbook. It is a stunning collection of fully realized, well-wrought poetry that gives the reader a sense that the poet is speaking with us. Many of her poems feel like discoveries and mysteries unfolding. Voigt’s keen and lucid attention to the natural world is remarkable and, pairing that with her narratives about family, makes for a surprising and wonderous mix of the lyric narrative. In her poem “The Unfinished Nest: “And we were a clutch of nine small worlds / sky-blue, dappled little things with feathers.” Voigt’s writing is serene and wise and profoundly personal, consistently light, delivered oftentimes in couplets, which gives the reader time to breathe, to appreciate these poems filled with joy and sorrow, longing and letting go: “The puncture wounds where love leeches out / The possible holes in my future. Though I fear these spaces, / they have allowed in light….” Voigt’s voice is intentional and uncomplicated. Tenderness is the adjective I refer to when reading her work, but she’s always in command. Each line can stand on its own. One of my favorite poems in this collection is “That Autumn in Pennsylvania.” From the first line this speaker pulls us in with the discovery: “Little has given me so much joy / as to walk quietly into that field of horses….” And truly reminiscent of James Wright’s poem, “A Blessing,” Voigt ends this poem with the gorgeous: “I feel the weight of her. Such large love / so late in the year.” After reading this collection I was struck by Voigt’s adoration of the natural world, and its sounds: “I sing / the mourning dove’s song of the overcast. / Soft bleat, mild wail. There is no heaven / like that song.” To quote Mark Doty: “… everything here has been transformed into feeling….” There’s a benevolence about Voigt’s work. Read it. Enjoy the world through her eyes.
–Carine Topal, author of In Order of Disappearance
The lyric poems in Beverly Voigt’s Song of the Overcast invite us to pause our frenzied actions and breathe in the world—“the goldenrods” like “smoldering gods”; “the moon’s dream of itself in a nightdress”; “grasses beginning to lie down.” The voice is deceptively gentle, but proves to be stringent in its observations, its quiet demand that we really look through Voigt’s astute and singular gaze. In their careful and unflinching seeing, these poems remake the world.
–Terry Wolverton, Ruin Porn
Beverly Voigt is a West Coast Rilke or Hopkins, a contemplative of nature and the remembered landscapes of the past. Song of the Overcast is a chaplet of textured poems that seek hope within lament and elegy like marrow within bone. Here, tenderness and stark truth coexist in a balance that yields “words written in a needle’s eye, poems / on a fishhook, curved to the metal.” To be a mourning dove, to sing the mourning dove’s “song of the overcast,” proves to be a worthy aspiration in this fine collection of poems.
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by Linda Pastan
I am learning to abandon the world before it can abandon me. Already I have given up the moon and snow, closing my shades against the claims of white. And the world has taken my father, my friends. I have given up melodic lines of hills, moving to a flat, tuneless landscape. And every night I give my body up limb by limb, working upwards across bone, towards the heart. But morning comes with small reprieves of coffee and birdsong. A tree outside the window which was simply shadow moments ago takes back its branches twig by leafy twig. And as I take my body back the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap as if to make amends.
by Maggie Blake Bailey
For Rick Barot
The definition of metaphor is the transfer of burden, so pay attention.
There is the heron of my longing: the curve of neck, stilt of legs, blue, breakable, prone to flight.
The summer of my certainty: lit with streaks of a fox’s tail slipping back into the woods.
The house of my mother’s madness: worn front steps lost to waist high weeds and debt.
Now watch a small bird building her nest inside a watering can, darting each piece of straw through
the one round opening. Imagine a young chick learning to fly by launching itself skyward,
the stunned drop to the bottom, rattle of wings inside metal, mocking blue coin of sky, and name it.
This cup for sake changes its color when filled with hot beverage - and the sakura starts blooming! Via @Japan_Vibe
That is so fucking cool.
I don’t say this often, but I WANT ONE
like for donald trump, reblog for this piece of grass
Blade of grass: 2016
Blade of grass: 2020
Why are there this many likes
Liking before reading hopefully
Maybe I’m summoning an ancient eldritch entity collective but can we get out the vote to the That One Particular Blade of Grass In My Front Lawn fandom? I really think we have a shot at electing a good leader this time around
Meet American’s first tiny houses. Our buddy Lloyd Kahn reminded us of this era of pioneer homebuilding in America’s West. From @messynessychic:
Common in the late 19th century, houses carved inside massive tree stumps were a staple of life in states like Oregon, Washington and California, where the lumber industry was booming and leaving a veritable sea of beheaded trees in its wake. Crafty by nature, the pioneers took to those wastelands and upcycled the stumps into homes, dancefloors, hotels – you name it.
Allegheny Cemetery 72319-9
by Ted Kooser
Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations. Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies like a snowflake falling on water. Below us, some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death, snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn back into the little system of his care. All night, the cities, like shimmering novas, tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.
by Tony Hoagland
The wind comes down from the northwest, cold in September, and flips over the neighbor’s trash receptacles.
The Halifax newspaper says that mansions are falling into the sea. Storms are rising in the dark Pacific.
Pollution has infiltrated the food chain down to the jellyfish level. The book I am reading is called “The End of the Ascent of Man.”
It says the time of human dominion is done, but I am hoping it will be a peaceful transition.
It is one thing to think of buffalo on Divisadero Street, of the Golden Gate Bridge overgrown in a tangle of vine.
It is another to open the door of your own house to the waves. I am hoping the humans will be calm in their diminishing.
That the forests grow back with patience, not rage; I am hoping the flocks of geese increase their number only gradually.
Let it be like an amnesia that we don’t even notice; the hills forgetting the name for our kind. Then the sky.
Let the fish rearrange their green governments as the rain spatters slant on their roof.
It is important that we expire. It is a kind of work we have begun in order to complete.
Today out of the north the cold wind comes down, and I go out to see
the neighbor’s trash bins have toppled in the drive. I see the unpicked grapes have turned to small sweet raisins on their vine.
I see the wren has found a way to make its little nest inside the cactus thorns.
Seen on a walk towards the “Col de Tricot”, in the Mont Blanc Valley, French Alps
Submitted by Paul Thomas
