“Scene from an Untended Garden,” “Christmas in the Yard,” and “December Mushrooms” appeared December 1st in Dodging the Rain (IE). 

https://dodgingtherain.wordpress.com

“It’s impossible to consider the landscape of the last 50 years of American poetry without Kinnell,” Craig Teicher writes in the Los Angeles Times of Galway Kinnell’s posthumous “Collected Poems” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017).  Citing the well-known, “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps” and “Blackberry Eating,” Teicher says that, at their best, Kinnell’s poems evoke intimacy with nature, self, and other, yet he wonders if younger readers will accept such “secular spiritualisms” as the line, “everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing.”  My guess is that many will, especially when such a line is read in context.  Citing “When the Towers Fell” (regarding 9/11), Teicher suggests that we need more poems like this one “which ache to understand others’ suffering.”

Many of the selected poems in Mary Oliver’s “Devotions,” (Penguin Press, 2017) will be familiar to followers of her work.  What I like about this volume is that the voice in the newer poems is informal, even conversational.  “Do Stones Feel?” (from Felicity, 2015), for instance, has a lightheartedness to it, and yet it has depth, too.  Like the koan, “Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?,” it invites the reader to go beyond the limitations of opposites and enter a world of delight.  As Oliver writes in “Three Things to Remember”: “As long as you’re dancing, you can/ break the rules/ Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules./ Sometimes there are no rules.”              

Wishing you all the joys of the season, and a happy and healthy new year!