front cover of The Double Truth
The Double Truth
Chard deNiord
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011
The Double Truth is a collection of poems that arc from myth to history, knowledge to mystery, Eros to natural love, animals to human beings, then back in an alternating poetic current that betrays a speaker who is at once a privileged witness of her time and a diachronic amalgam of voices that are as imagined as they are real in their anonymous legacy.
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front cover of I Would Lie to You if I Could
I Would Lie to You if I Could
Interviews with Ten American Poets
Chard deNiord
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018
I Would Lie To You If I Could contains interviews with nine eminent contemporary American poets (Natasha Trethewey, Jane Hirshfield, Martín Espada, Stephen Kuusisto, Stephen Sandy, Ed Ochester, Carolyn Forche, Peter Everwine, and Galway Kinnell) and James Wright’s widow Anne. It presents conversations with a vital cross section of poets representing a variety of ages, ethnicities, and social backgrounds.

The poets testify to the demotic nature of poetry as a charged language that speaks uniquely in original voices, yet appeals universally. As individuals with their own transpersonal stories, the poets have emerged onto the national stage from very local places with news that witnesses memorably in social, personal, and political ways. They talk about their poems and development as poets self-effacingly, honestly, and insightfully, describing just how and when they were "hurt into poetry," as well as why they have pursued writing poetry as a career in which, as Robert Frost noted in his poem "Two Tramps in Mud Time," their object has become "to unite [their] avocation and [their] vocation / As [their] two eyes make one in sight."
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front cover of In My Unknowing
In My Unknowing
Poems
Chard deNiord
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
In his new poetry collection, Chard deNiord explores the paradoxical nature of unknowing.

I WEPT WITH JOY ABOVE THE RIVER

I wept with joy above the river.
I wept with sorrow above the river.
My tears were clear, both sweet and bitter.
One leaf cried out to another,
“Empty me today of all my color.
Fill me tomorrow with a shot of sugar.”
This was the still ritual for my feet:
To stand on the earth that took of earth earth with ill and sing.
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front cover of Interstate
Interstate
Chard deNiord
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015
Interstate is a collection of lyrical poems in four sections that concentrate thematically on animals, love and sex, compassion, and loss. A unifying elegiac conceit, even in the more ecstatic and humorous poems, betrays the bittersweet nature of the book's muse. Alternating between free and formal verse, the poems contain a lyrical tension in which their "broken music" evokes metaphysical paradoxes, romantic humor, and the "dark sounds" that effect what Garcia Lorca called "the power everyone feels" in the mystery of duende "but no philosopher can explain."
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Night Mowing
Chard deNiord
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005
The poems in Night Mowing find their influence in the natural and the erotic; the biblical and the classical; the aesthetic and the spiritual. The landscape exists as both an ecstatic source of inspiration and as an endangered garden, and the narrator of these poems moves through that landscape in admiration and anguish: trying to preserve his joyful innocence while fully aware of the transience of all that he sees. Each poem in its specifics, whether focusing on a lover, a mountain, a dog, or a critic, wrestles with the universal and sacred, revealing the instinct of the poems to move toward purity and deep feeling even in dark times.
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front cover of What Saves Us
What Saves Us
Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump
Edited by Martín Espada
Northwestern University Press, 2019

This is an anthology of poems in the Age of Trump—and much more than Trump. These are poems that either embody or express a sense of empathy or outrage, both prior to and following his election, since it is empathy the president lacks and outrage he provokes.

There is an extraordinary diversity of voices here. The ninety-three poets featured include Elizabeth Alexander, Julia Alvarez, Richard Blanco, Carolyn Forché, Aracelis Girmay, Donald Hall, Juan Felipe Herrera, Yusef Komunyakaa, Naomi Shihab Nye, Marge Piercy, Robert Pinsky, Danez Smith, Patricia Smith, Brian Turner, Ocean Vuong, Bruce Weigl, and Eleanor Wilner. They speak of persecuted and scapegoated immigrants. They bear witness to violence: police brutality against African Americans, mass shootings in a school or synagogue, the rage inflicted on women everywhere. They testify to poverty: the waitress surviving on leftovers at the restaurant, the battles of a teacher in a shelter for homeless mothers, the emergency-room doctor listening to the heartbeats of his patients. There are voices of labor, in the factory and the fields. There are prophetic voices, imploring us to imagine the world we will leave behind in ruins lest we speak and act.

However, this is not merely a collection of grievances. The poets build bridges. One poet steps up to translate in Arabic at the airport; another walks through the city and sees her immigrant past in the immigrant present; another declaims a musical manifesto after the hurricane that devastated his island; another evokes a demonstration in the street, shouting in an ecstasy of defiance. The poets take back the language, resisting the demagogic corruption of words themselves. They assert our common humanity in the face of dehumanization.

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