A delightful reading

images-2Last week I drove down to Stanford to hear Ellen Bryant Voigt read. I had heard of her, but not read much of her work. It was worth the long drive through the increasingly dense traffic of the Bay Area. The words that come to mind are vibrant authentic.

Here is a poem from her new book. Unlike her earlier books, these poems dispense with punctuation, but I think you will be able to decipher the poem’s sense without it:

Roof

after a week of heavy snow I want to praise my roof first
the acute angle at which it descends form the ridgepole
and second that it is black the color absorbing
all the other colors so that even now as arctic air Continue reading “A delightful reading”