Upon a Slender Stalk
by
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Preview Poems In the morning when you have no words what do you say to the silence as you whisk the eggs with the splash of milk A pat of butter sizzles in the hot iron skillet The eggs have been cracked so we can make an omelet mincing garlic, dicing peppers slicing onions, grating cheese reaching for words in the morning to fold gently into the silence Peanut Butter Days Some days I feel crushed ground, mixed, creamed, blended sealed in a great shelved jar. Then you spread me thick on the fresh, warm bread of your life slather me with the sweet sweet jam of our love and lift my head to your lips with a grand, eager smile. A Clod of Earth Meditation on Psalm 85:8-13 It is good to get dirt under the nails to mince dark loam between one’s fingers to work the earth with sweating brow. Who knows what may spring up from the ground? Keep hoeing, I say. Don’t forget faithfulness. Be sure to water well during a dry spell. Sit a while in the garden among the lavender. Chew a mint leaf between your teeth. Savor the peace that is spoken there. Hold a lump of dirt in your hand. Mold it as you were molded. Breathed into as you were breathed.
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About the Book
This collection of poems was assembled from five decades of writing. Uniting the poems is an attempt to find words that record the material world while also cracking it open to the mystery that animates all things. In this sense, the poems, even the secular and humorous among them, manifest the sacred, the holy present in every human, plant or rock. Should a label be put on the collection, and none fit well, they are poems built from concrete images, from a full opening of the senses, though sight seems to prevail. The poems provide the reader with the experience of joy and sorrow, pain and delight, a time to laugh and a time to cry. They open simple, ordinary events into larger spiritual realms. They grow from soil made rich from reading great poets, classical and contemporary, with special debts to John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Galway Kinnell, Linda Pasten, Sharon Olds, and Mary Oliver. Writers of fiction, the liturgy of the church, the Psalms, the writing of great mystics and naturalists have also influenced these poems. In particular, I mention Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, St. John of the Cross, Thoreau, and Annie Dillard. The list is long. One always writes in the wake of other writers. Lastly, the poems grow from a quiet love lived with loving friends and family. The love and the quiet are present as subtext of many poems. They are poems about the little things which, pieced together, form a life worth living.
About the Author
Larry Grimes is Professor Emeritus of English in the Gresham Chair for Humanities at Bethany College (WV) where he was Department Chair for 25 years. He also served as Dean of Arts and Sciences and Vice President and Dean of the Faculty. He is the author of The Religious Design of Hemingway’s Early Fiction and, with Bickford Sylvester, editor of Hemingway, Cuba, and the Cuban Works, and with Bickford Sylvester and Peter Hays, author of The Old Man and the Sea. for the Kent State University Press. A founding member of the Hemingway Society, he has served on the Hemingway Society Board and is, presently, Director of the International Hemingway Conference scheduled for July 2022 in Sheridan, Wyoming and Cooke City, Montana. In addition to his several essays on Hemingway, he has published essays on crime fiction, the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the Coen Brothers, and is completing a collection of poems. In his spare time, he makes a drinkable cabernet sauvignon and teases trout every chance he can get.