For Starr Atkinson, Who Designed Books
Oldest of words, of sounds: star.
Everything of that name perishes.
The sun will reclaim each planet,
the galaxy collapse, light itself
siphon down into a last darkness.
From you I learned how images balance
in the white space of each page,
how pages unfold like leaves,
how light and dark interpenetrate,
how what we do will not be noticed.
Light from those stars coming deep
from space, reaching our own eyes
in darkness, at the top of a hill;
words on a page keeping the old sounds,
the ones worth saying another time.
[from Darkened Rooms of Summer: New and Selected Poems]
*
The first volume in the Ted Kooser Contemporary Poetry Series. From the publisher’s Web site:
For nearly half a century, Jared Carter has been quietly mapping the American heartland. Line by line, his poetry has shown us the landscape, sounded the voices, conjured the music, and tested the silence of the ever-changing and yet ever-constant Midwest that figures so prominently in the American story. And yet what we find in Carter’s poetry is endlessly new.
Here, in poems selected from his first five books, is the summer-long buzz of the cicada and the crack of the cue ball, the young rebel on his big Harley, and the YMCA secretary who backstrokes her way across the indoor pool. Here, too, are thirty new poems in fixed form that illustrate Carter’s continued quest for a poetry of “universal interest.” Taken together, these selections are, truly, poetry in the American grain.
Thank you, Mr. Hutchison, for posting my poem.