The poems in Everything That Rises, Joseph Stroud’s sixth book, explore the ephemeral world, mortality, and the redemptive possibilities of poetry. The book is sequenced into sections, each distinctive in theme and style, from short six-line lyrics and slender vertical poems, to longer, ruminative works. A section of translations includes Virgil, Catullus, Tu Fu, Neruda, and poems from the ancient Sanskrit and Tamil. Wide ranging in setting, persona, and cultural allusion, many of the poems merge the elegiac with the celebratory in a manner that is characteristic of Stroud’s vision. The poems move quietly, reverently across the earth with keen observation and wonder.
ISBN: 9781556595646
Format: Paperback
Hovering
for Tom Marshall
Tom and I are walking Last Chance Road
down from the mountain where we had been
hunting mushrooms under a stand of coast oaks,
walking down and looking out to the Pacific
shimmering in the late fall sun, the light
on the surface like glittering flakes of mica,
when we see a white-tailed kite hovering
in the air, hovering over a green pasture,
hovering over the day, over the two of us,
our very lives hovering as well, there
on the California coast, in the fall, in the sun,
on our way home, with a sack of chanterelles,
with our love for this world, with so much time,
and so little time—all of it—hovering—
and hovering still.
Reviews
“By ‘dismantling one moment from the next,’ Stroud reminds us that joy belongs to everyone and is found everywhere.” ―Santa Cruz Sentinel
“He is a poet who drinks at night from a trough of ‘cold water / brimming / with stars,’ and who understands the difference between sorrows that are ‘merely literary’ and those ‘written in an ink crushed from the heart.” ―San Diego Union Tribune
“One of the finest collections of poems I’ve read in years―intelligent, sensuous, moving, full of human insight.” ―Ploughshares
“These poems affirm the value of life and love, while recognizing the inevitable suffering of the loss, not only of loved ones, but of one’s own youthful self.” ―Fuel
“Like all the best poets Stroud makes the earth again consolable.” ―Jim Harrison
“One feels in this work not an agenda but a disciplined insistence on attention to the world and a belief in its capacity for revelation.” ―Green River Review
“Mr. Stroud’s poetry comes from the clear source.” ―W.S. Merwin