Poetry is both timeless and of its time. It rings with the melody of the specific moment and place in which it was written, while resonating far into the future with its meaning and insight. Notre Dame Press has been publishing poetry for decades, and as this year’s National Poetry Month draws to a close we have a list of some of our backlist poetic gems. These verses ring as powerfully as the day they were written, and we’re proud to bring them to your shelf.
True North by Stephanie Strickland explores wayfaring, both in a spiritual sense and in the sense of knowledge navigation in an information age. It explores American history, encompassing writing and identity in the figures of Emily Dickinson and Willard Gibbs, the country’s first mathematical physicist.
a need to hide that overcomes
—from “Prometheus, or The Eagle’s Prey”
the afflicted,
for they are dressed: bound
and exhibited
in their degradation—Prometheus
nailed, in the open, on
the rock. Prey to all.
Parched by light.
Janet Holmes’s second book of poems, The Green Tuxedo, explores and interrogates the quotidian life of the late twentieth century for what exists behind its often seductive appearance. In these poems we see beneath acceptable, sleek surfaces into the turbulence they often conceal, as the splendid green tuxedo of the title may disguise a heart that harbors racism, fear, and violence. Holmes exhorts us to look beyond the face value of what presents itself, to resist literal interpretations, and to plumb the many depths afforded by each encounter with the world outside ourselves.
Now in the night they wish to know who
—from “Landscape Duel”
I love best, like siblings beleaguering
their passionate mother: in the sleepless dark
the stars are suddenly bright, a rescue party
coming upon me from afar, their torches
lit and flickering across the miles—
Pity the Drowned Horses is the winner of the first Andres Montoya Poetry Prize. This collection is about place and many of the poems in it are set in the desert southwest on the U.S./Mexico border in El Paso, Texas. Sheryl Luna’s poems are also about family and home within the broader context of the border as both a bridge and a barrier. They deal with the bilingual and bicultural city and how a place is longed for and viewed very differently as the observer changes and experiences other cultures.
Endless husky-throated voices of rage
—from “Sonata on Original Sin”
turned to snow one night. Voices of women
nearby rose lighthearted with the sparrows.
I mourn the way we were afraid to kiss
beneath the oaks, the moon laughing,
the moon crying. Us at the center of the small universe.
We two stars lingered in the bodied voice of time,
rising from dirges and requiems
like dancing stars, on the chaos of a blood-sonata.
Ned Balbo’s Sandeen Prize-winning collection of poetry Lives of the Sleepers seeks a voice for contemporary and historical figures as they face the ecstasy and grief of love. In these assured and powerful poems, Balbo’s confidence in lyric, narrative, and dramatic forms is always evident: lovers whirl in Dante’s circle, saints suffer for their faith, and characters from Hitchcock films are caught in traps of their own making.
Returned as song, pond trembling at the touch
—from “Millennial”
Of sound limbs, swift recoil. Or song reduced
To silence, revelation come to all—
Foreknowledge proven, prophecy fulfilled,
Vision confirmed, lives vanished? Nothing sure
Except, despite the dark, this certainty:
Eyes not ours will behold a world transformed.
The title poem in Jude Nutter’s The Curator of Silence—about a group of schoolchildren illustrating Shelley’s “Ode to a Skylark”—ends with the following assertion: “these are the only / lessons they will ever need to learn: that life / is not artifact, but aperture—a stepping into / and a falling away; that to sing is to rise / from the grave of the body. And still / say less than nothing.” This idea of the aperture, the gap, the silence that exists between what we want to say and what we actually do say pervades The Curator of Silence. The paradox, of course, is that the creation of art itself makes this gap, as there is always a gulf between the impulse and the gesture, the vision and the poem.
behind the white door of the page, the darkness
—from “The Poet in Reflection”
of the mind before it thought itself into existence.
And how long does it take those ships to travel
from one shore to another, weighed down
with evidence of a previous darkness, deeper,
even, than the one they ply through? Long
enough. Long enough.
The poems in Juan Luna’s Revolver both address history and attempt to transcend it through their exploration of the complexity of diaspora. Attending to the legacy of colonial and postcolonial encounters, Luisa A. Igloria has crafted poems that create links of sympathetic human understanding, even as they revisit difficult histories and pose necessary questions about place, power, displacement, nostalgia, beauty, and human resilience in conditions of alienation and duress.
How many names
—from “Decoding the Signature”
for desert winds?
Imagine that historian
swallowed in a column of sand
so he could learn
even a few
of its hundred forms:
The poems in Manuel Paul López’s The Yearning Feed, winner of the 2013 Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, are embedded in the San Diego/Imperial Valley regions, communities located along the U.S.-Mexico border. López, an Imperial Valley native, considers La Frontera, or the border, as magical, worthy of Macondo-like comparisons, where contradictions are firmly rooted and ironies play out on a daily basis. These poems synthesize López’s knowledge of modern and contemporary literature with a border-child vernacular sensibility to produce a work that illustrates the ongoing geographical and literary historical clash of cultures.
Lord,
—from “Psalm”
when I indirectly force my grandmother
to speak English because I can’t
understand Spanish,
it’s like strapping ice skates
to an eighty-four-year-old woman’s feet
and shoving her across
a hockey rink the size
of the Arctic Circle.