Tag: This Pagan Heaven

• Pushcart Prize Nominations and Peony Moon Picks

  Many thanks to  poet Michelle McGrane, author of peony moon, for compiling an exhaustive list of poetry picks for 2009. Michelle posted nine days of readers’ top-three poetry collections of 2009. You can find my picks here.

  Although the three books listed were top on my list the day I sent Michelle my selections, I could easily have added others. Each time I went to peony moon to see what the latest collections were, I thought of other books I could have listed, such as Robin Kemp’s fabulous This Pagan Heaven.

  Kemp’s collection has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and well deserves to win.

  I’d also like to thank Barry Harris, editor of the Tipton Poetry Journal, and Katie Kowalski, assistant editor, for including my poem “Everything is a Sign” among their nominations for the Pushcart Prize for 2009. I also need to give Read Write Poem their props, since my idea to write the poem came from one of their writing prompts.

  Here’s a complete list of the poems the Tipton Poetry Journal nominated this year:

  2009 Nominations
  Gilbert Allen	Inside Self-Storage (Winter 2009)
  Matthew Landrum	Rebecca With Tequila Shot (Spring 2009)
  Bonnie Maurer	Hymn To A Lost Breast (Spring 2009)
  Christine Swint	Everything is a Sign (Spring 2009)
  Michael Brockley	When the Woman in the White Sweater at the Cancelled Charles Simic Reading Asked If I Was David Shumate (Summer 2009)
  Ruthelen Burns	Fallen (Fall 2000)

  December 15, 2009

  peony moon, Pushcart Nominations 2009, Pushcart Prize, Robin Kemp, This Pagan Heaven, Tipton Poetry Journal

  ---

• Review of This Pagan Heaven by Robin Kemp

  Robin Kemp’s This Pagan Heaven (Pecan Grove Press, 2009) is a collection of twenty-five articulate, passionate, finely crafted poems. The book begins with eight sonnets, both Shakespearean and Italian, that follow a traditional rhyme scheme, but vary in meter. The formal skill displayed in the opening poems shows right away that Kemp has earned her poetry chops. Some of sonnets are about love and passion, traditional themes for this form, but others are metaphysical, in the tradition of John Donne. There’s one called “Pelican Sonnet,” with an epigram that says “who the hell writes a sonnet about a pelican?”

  “Pelican Sonnet,” which depicts a speaker watching birds in flight “over the bayou’s mouth,” paves the way for the next series of poems in the book. Now the speaker allows her memory to flow. In the free-verse poem “Dreaming of Your Hair,” the speaker remembers a past lover in New Orleans. There are also poems about her parents and her childhood, full of images and details that explain the speaker’s current life as a poet. The pieces are autobiographical, examining the New Orleans of her past.

  There are also poems with a political voice, such as “Pantoum for Ari Fleisher” and “Bodies.” “Bodies” is a lyric poem in eight sections that juxtaposes scenes from Kemp’s native New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Because Kemp is from New Orleans, she writes about the flood with an intimate knowledge of the victims and their losses. In “Editing Katrina” the speaker evokes her frustration and grief over the horrific scenes of her beloved city that she has seen only from the CNN news room (where Kemp was a journalist before her current life as a PhD candidate at Georgia State in Atlanta).

  One of my favorite poems is the last one, “Red Moon,” a sonnet about a lunar eclipse. I remember watching the same eclipse from my front porch in Marietta. Kemp turns a night of star gazing into a feeling of connection to the people she’s with, a togetherness that engenders a hope for the future, “some hint of God beyond our own dark field. ” This line is a perfect ending for the collection, and a segue into Robin Kemp’s next one.

  To learn more about Robin Kemp, visit Robin Kemp: Author, Poet, Writer, Teacher.

  October 3, 2009

  Robin Kemp, This Pagan Heaven

  ---