Word: poems
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Early last year, the bush storyteller Murray Hartin penned a 14-stanza poem in three hours flat. Rain From Nowhere is about a farmer on the brink of ruin who receives an empathetic letter from his father. A celebration of resilience and hope, it is as moving a piece of Australian verse as has been published in decades. It's also pertinent. The driest continent on earth is in the grip of the worst drought in its recorded history. Beginning in 2002 and spanning, at times, the breadth of the country, the dry spell has pushed farmers to the limits...
...scholarly packaging) maybe 40% of the words here are Milton's. Perusing these passages, it's easy to see why most of America's Founding Fathers "read Milton and revered him" - and even easier to understand why, for at least two centuries, Paradise Lost was widely considered "the greatest poem in the language...
...Pennsylvania in 1964, and his father became a Presbyterian minister. Behind My Eyes is steeped in Lee's religious upbringing. "I doodled in the church bulletin on Sundays/ while my father offered the twenty-minute Pastor's Prayer," he recalls in "Cuckoo on the Witness Stand." Elsewhere in the poem, he recounts that "I sang in a church choir during one war/ American TV made famous." Lee also likens his own poetry to "a mission," but he's no firebrand proselytizer. His tone throughout this collection is that of the soft-spoken, ecumenical humanist. A mini-aubade in "Become Becoming...
...work is lovely and meditative, and the safe haven of Pennsylvania did not mean that the family could forget its troubled past. In several topical poems Lee pitilessly documents restive scenes from his stolen childhood, for him not so much a paradise lost as one never had. "A Hymn to Childhood," addressed either to the reader or to himself in the second person, has soldiers smashing a mother's china, while "you pretended to be dead with your sister in games of rescue and abandonment." The poem "Self-Help for Fellow Refugees" opens with his father being bundled into...
...down. Ignorant armies still clash in the night, but the prospect of a quiet moment of shared love, Lee reminds us, is enough reason to keep praising our mutilated world. "Alone in your favorite chair/ with a book you enjoy/ is fine," he writes at the end of one poem. "But spooning/ is even better." Even a past as turbulent as Lee's, it seems, can be wiped away by a hug in the here...