Take Five: Prose Poems by 5 Poets

Take Five, a book of prose poems by the poets Laura Baird, Deborah Brown, Barbara Siegel Carlson, Richard Jackson, and Susan Thomas, is a delightful surprise. The resonance of the voices against each other works well. The poems are short and often have a weight at their center. The poems feel pleasantly episodic and connected, and the structure of the book leads to a whole, like the title, with its reference to jazz musicians weaving together a tune, suggests. Buy here.

From “Suburban Morning”

. . . How hard it is to imagine the stutter of the automatic rifle rippling over the cries of the concert crowd. Here the soul of the mourning dove says something we’ll never understand to the soul of the morning. There are fissures in the words we try to use. The watermarks of the past having their say despite what we want to write. The coyote in the woods down the ravine trying to speak over the ambulance on the next street. History’s disobedient shadow on the garden wall.

From “Belief”

. . . Below here, even the cemeteries try to shrug off despair. Maybe time is a lizard emerging from the cracks in the stone wall. If I didn’t know better I’d say it was emerging from a dream that died here long ago. . .

From “Journal Entry”

. . . I surrender to hay bales and pastoral grandeur in praise of the discipline of farm work. This is how your life turns out. The clashing of habits meeting in the shadows. Today’s news stories are a consequence of this very same separateness and the past remains its own ongoing war. My thoughts drifting, like black smoke crossing the moon and down through pine trees.