The Poet's Child: A Copper Canyon Press Anthology

Michael Wiegers, ed.

The Poet’s Child explores the intimacies of parent and child, from true story to wildest dream, in an exhilarating range of experience and viewpoints. Whether the poet is from a contemporary American city or a Chinese village, from Norway, Poland, or the woods of the Pacific Northwest, each finds unique insights into this most universal subject, revising and revitalizing our shared experience. What parent has not looked at a son or daughter and thought:

I suspect I am here less for your protection
 
than you are here for mine.

The Poet’s Child is the first in a series of Copper Canyon Press anthologies to explore common themes. The nearly forty contributors include:
 
Marvin Bell
Kay Boyle
Hayden Carruth
Susan Griffin
Ho Xuan Huong
Carolyn Kizer
Thomas McGrath
W.S. Merwin
Kenneth Rexroth
Alberto Ríos
Rebecca Seiferle
Ann Stanford
Su Tung-p’o
Eleanor Wilner
C.D. Wright
 
(Correction: The copyright notice for the photograph on the cover was inadvertantly omitted from the book. It is Untitled, by Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925-1972), 1960/print 1981 by Christopher Meatyard, copyright the estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard. We apologize for any confusion.)

Paperback: $12.00 list price

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ISBN: 9781556591754

Format: Paperback

Maternity

Anna Swir
translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan
 
I gave birth to life.
It went out of my entrails
and asks for the sacrifice of my life
as does an Aztec deity.
I lean over a little puppet,
we look at each other
with four eyes.
“You are not going to defeat me,” I say.
“I won’t be an egg which you would crack
in a hurry for the world,
a footbridge that you would take on the way to your life.
I will defend myself.”
I lean over a little puppet,
I notice
a tiny movement of a tiny finger
which a little while ago was still in me,
in which, under a thin skin,
my own blood flows.
And suddenly I am flooded
by a high, luminous wave
of humility.
Powerless, I drown.

About the Editor

Michael Wiegers has been editing books for Copper Canyon Press since 1993, and currently serves as the Press’s Executive Editor/Editor in Chief. Most recently, he edited two anthologies of Copper Canyon Press poetry, both published this year: A House Called Tomorrow: 50 Years of Poetry and Come Shining: More Poems and Stories from Fifty Years of Copper Canyon Press. He is also the poetry editor of Narrative magazine and edited What About This: The Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, which …

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Reviews

“This collection gathers some 78 poems by 42 poets… All are worthwhile.” —Virginia Quarterly Review

“Don’t expect pretty sentimentality. The Poet’s Child practices a kind of literary tough love. This is one of those books that won’t yield up all of its dimensions immediately.”—The Olympian

“Together the poems in The Poet’s Child celebrate a belief in the power of poetry to communicate truths both hard and beautiful, truths that unite us as parents, as children, and, finally, as the complex human beings we are.” —Brain Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers

“Its readership of course should be not only those who love poetry but those who love children.” —New Mexican