It’s a beautiful brilliant blue day outside after several days of overcast chilliness. I like the Easter story, which always somehow also reminds me of Persephone, emerging from the Underworld to bring spring to the above-ground. The sunshine, the flowers blooming, and my birthday coming up: it does feel a little like we are emerging from something, doesn’t it, every April?
Yesterday we took my folks to the San Diego Zoo’s Wild Animal park. We got to see a six-week-old cheetah. You just have to love baby cheetah cubs. And it’s really hard to be depressed looking at meerkats. Yes, I should have stayed with my zoological interests and become a zoo biologist, I sometimes think. There were also many great egrets building nests in the trees around the park, zooming overhead.
Also, I was able to write a couple of poetry fragments – beginnings and bits of poems – that I felt happy with. I seem to be writing longer poems lately, a bit at a time.
Anyway, here’s wishing you at least one chocolate Easter bunny and a bright pink bunch of rununculus. (Marshmallow peeps half-price tomorrow!)
More mini-review madness
Mary Biddinger’s Prairie Fever:
Don’t expect any mild-mannered nature poetry about prairie wildlife here, although wildlife does appear, torn and bedraggled, birds dead on windowsills, red flowers appearing on throats. Full of dark fragmentary looks at the inner and outer violences of the bored bad girls of the prairie, poking dead bodies with sticks, rinsing their hair with beer, and making out in abandoned barns. Stark, vivid writing illuminating shadows with lightning-sharp imagery and bone-cracking emotion.
Did some more Expedia work today, then combed Craigslist for places to live, which were all too expensive, which made me comb Craigslist for more part-time work. All in all, depressing.
In reading news:
Peter’s new book reading at Open Books was standing room only, and Peter was wonderful. His new book even has a couple of mythology-alluding poems in it! You know I’m a sucker for those. Here’s the first few lines from “Case History: Persephone:”
“The visiting surgery resident
inserts the icy speculum
while the mother stands nearby
clutching her only daughter’s pale hand.
Outside the window – a barren
January day. The long fields lie empty,
their edges stitched with bare trees.”
Isn’t he a great poet?
