NORTH CAROLINA POETRY SOCIETY

While cleaning out my box of photos today, I found this one taken at a NC Poetry Society gathering at the Weymouth Center in Southern Pines. My book Black Shawl had won the Society's annual Brockman-Campbell Award, judged by Billy Collins, and I was there to accept the award and give a poetry reading. From the left you can see me in an earlier version, Sally Buckner and Shelby Stephenson sitting side by side, and standing, Isabel Zuber. Sally has been one of our state's literary stalwarts, editing anthologies, teaching poetry, writing and publishing her own work. You will find a feature on her latest book, Collateral Damage, on our ncarts.org archive of Writers and Books. Shelby's latest book. Family Matters: Homage to July, won the Bellday Award and was featured on this blog just a few months ago. Look on the side bar, and you'll see that he was a Poet of the Week, as well. Isabel Zuber's two chapbooks are Oriflamb and Winter's Exile. Her full-length collection Red Lily is forthcoming from Press 53. Picador published her novel Salt a few years back.


The NC Poetry Society is a great group of writers and readers. If you haven't joined, please consider doing so. Go to their website, http://www.sleepycreek.org/poetry, and read their poem of the month, Borges and Me, by Maria C. Rouphail, take a look at their activities, and read news of their members. When you go to a NC Poetry Society event, you'll meet some of our best poets, like Sally, Shelby, and Isabel, as well as Pat Riviere-Seel, Bill Blackley, Susan Meyers, Bill Griffin and so on and so on into what seems like poetic infinity! And you'll have fun, too.

(Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humamnities, where the NCPS meets.)

End of October

Here is a spine-tingling poem for the season, by my friend Isabel Zuber, poet and novelist. It is from her as yet unpublished manuscript of poems, RED LILY.


END OF OCTOBER


Tonight's their time but they came early,
have been here all day, watching
from among the trees, rustling faded grass.
They speak in whispers too low for sound,
seem to approve the way we've let the place
go to wild and ruin, its hedges pokeweed--
bright, beautiful poison--
tangles of rose, honeysuckle.

Clouds come and go as I hang out the clothes
with them still observing it all. Then later
I sense what could have been their breath
as I unpin warmed white sheets,
sun-fragrant towels, the shirts.

Do they think they've been summoned?
I know better than to do that, yet
strain to hear voices in the leaves.
"Why have you left me?" they call.
But to the evening's strange
and rising wind I say nothing. They linger
for any who will listen but by now
they have no differences and
all their smiles are grave.




(Isabel Zuber)