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A Farm Under Poplars
Patrick Todd |
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Poetry
88 Pages
ISBN: 0-910055-68-8
Paper: $13.95 $5.00
ISBN: 0-910055-69-6
Cloth: $23.95 $9.00
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In this, his fourth book of poems, Patrick Todd shows how memory erupts at unexpected moments, aroused by the changeling artifacts of time and circumstance, and how the dignity of common labor must be rescued from despair. Deftly folding image into image, Todd gives us a clarity, through which we may come to understand the unity of experience. No matter how fragmentary and isolated life may often seem, it is a dance of whimsy and yearning and A Farm Under Poplars welcomes us, again, to its charms.
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| Patrick Todd, a former university creative writing professor, is now a residential/commercial contract painter at the University of Montana. This is his fourth book of poems. |
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| An excerpt from A Farm Under Poplars |
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| Wedding in Late Winter |
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More than once I climbed
over the sill, undressed in the dark,
and slipped naked into her bed
Young and penniless lovers, soon we
stood at the altar, eight candles weaving strange
shadows in the night church
Almost five months pregnant, Katie
could barely hear the music
And like a big farm hand in a sport coat, I was dumb
to the wonder and sorrows of
a possible future |
| ...............* |
Four children and seventeen years
later, our divorce offers up its own grief
and slow meandering death
Or like two men I remember in a fight
after a wedding in Seattle
Drunk, one shouted something mean-hearted and obscene,
blood splattered across the front
of his snowy tux |
| ...............* |
Years ago, during a freezing
winter in New York,
I leaned over a museum case to marvel
at a Roman dagger A merchant
or sailor might have worn the weapon to his own wedding
Still too raw, my divorce burns now as though
everything happened to someone else
Whoever owned the dagger probably didn't kill anyone
He admired, though, the double-edge blade and three
small rubies on the handle
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