Fresh Looks

[SPIRIT BLAST is looking at poems through a bartender’s eye. —Ed] What’s this? Surprised by an ingredient you thought you …

In a state of near-misery, I return to reading I did this summer: Dorothea Schmidt Wender’s ’73 translation of Hesiod …

A lamb could not get born. Ice wind Out of a downpour dishclout sunrise. The mother Lay on the mudded …

The grand weird gesture of the title “Gilgamesh” and the gentle cruelty of the first line—‘We lived on a lake with …

Invention sleeps within a skull No longer quick with light, The hive that hummed in every cell Is now …

Hers is a geode still hollowing a room for crystals. When someone tells me that ‘the heart is found a …

Card in the mail: “Win a free cremation.” • On the table top, a scatter, grains of salt (sugar?) …

In David Baker’s “Belong To,” the you and me of the ballad “You Belong to Me” (made famous by Patti …

I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done …

Elegy in a Spider’s Web What to say when the spider Say when the spider what When the spider the …

The wind suffers of blowing, The sea suffers of water, And fire suffers of burning, And I of a …

There is a moment after you move your eye away when you forget where you are because you’ve been …

The ruined cathedral wept into my flesh because I held nothing within me with warmth enough to deflect it. …

The professors of English have taken their gowns to the laundry, have taken themselves to the fields. Dreams of …

In the Shreve High football stadium, I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, And gray faces of …

Stars wheel in purple, yours is not so rare as Hesperus, nor yet so great a star as bright …

As a reader, “God’s Grandeur” staggers me with its ‘bringing into being,’ immediately: first, an unflinching declarative, then the flame, then …

Since the 1968 birth of her inaugural collection, Firstborn, Louise Glück has been writing the poetry of modern myth. Ararat …