Synopsis:

In her first full-length collection, Susan Meyers guides us through her examination of life's ordinary moments and the seemingly ordinary images that abide in them to reveal the extraordinary. From minutiae to marriage, crumbs to crows, nothing is too commonplace to escape her attention as she traverses terrains of childhood, loss, relationships, and death. Mostly lyrical and often elegiac, the poems of Keep and Give Away move along the rifts between the past and present, the lived and desired. The dominant emotions of the verses are deepened by observations rooted in our natural world, where birds are "yeses quickening the air" and the sky can "lap you up, and up." In the book's final section, marriage poems turn to fishing and gardening for their truths, contemplations that recognize the realities of a world governed by luck, imperfection, contraries, and—most of all—love.

Book Excerpt:

Contraries

 

You sit on the front steps in love

with the little birds, the finches

& sparrows fidgeting from leafy cover,

not that they need you

cheering them on to eat the seed

at the feeders hung just for them—

sunflower, millet, a white sock of thistle;

but when the hawk lowers its broad

red shoulders and sits, alone,

on the limb of the cherry tree,

after the little birds, seeing it coming,

have scattered like ifs and whens,

 

you pull for the hawk, admiring

its heft, the turn of its head,

not to mention the unblenched eyes,

its black-banded tail. How could you not

root for this brown serenity lifting off,

grudgeless and oblivious to grudge?

Now the finches & sparrows are back,

with two chickadees, all astir,

flitting their soft agitation.

Once again you fall

for the little birds, their flutter

of yeses quickening the air.                   

 

Write a Review »

Author Comment:

Keep and Give Away is divided into three sections--"Trying to get it right," poems of childhood and contraries; "Need has nothing to do with it," elegies for my mother; and "Small bones of contention," marriage poems--with poems of the natural world woven throughout.

Topics/Categories:

Elegy, Family, Love, Nature

Genre:

American Poetry

Type of Work:

Poetry

Publishers:

University of South Carolina Press

Awards:

Brockman-Campbell Book Award SIBA Book Award for Poetry South Carolina Poetry Book Award

Purchase From:

University of South Carolina Press
Amazon.com
Barnes & Noble

Original Publish Date:

June 1, 2006

Formats and associated ISBNs:

978-1-57003-670-5

Formats:

Paperback

• Share With:
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•