Maureen Alsop (A Poem for the Summer Solstice)

I met Maureen through coldfront.com, the online review that dissed my last book. She had seen my "award" for the best response to a review and contacted me. Her latest book had also been dissed--by the same reviewer. She emailed me for some advice on dealing with bad reviews, or in her case, one bad review that overshadowed all the other good ones she had received. Why is life like that? One bad notice gnaws at us, no matter the other terrific things people have said about our writing, our teaching, our this and our that. Maureen lives in California and is poetry editor for the online poetry magazine Poemeleon.

I asked Maureen to send me some poems from her most recent book, Apparition Wren, published by Main Street Rag in Charlotte. This one seems suited to the sensuousness of early summer, when the earth opens herself to our trowels and our dreams.


Ascension

The body is a house I lived in once; for a time
I spoke to the wind. Radiance and dust blew
through me. I wore my dead

husband’s bathrobe, but he was dead only
in dreams. We, the only lovers

born to the deep lanes of dark,
unmapped our palms. Our hands,
pressed together, led always
between my legs.

In my closed field,

if you come too far, if you come
too far, you’ll feel the earth swagger,
constellations disperse, my succulent
loam soften open.




Maureen is the author of two collections of poetry: The Diction of Moths, (forthcoming from Ghost Road Press) and Apparition Wren (Main Street Rag, 2007). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various journals, including Tampa Review, New Delta Review, and Typo.