The New Formalist

Poetry Editor
Lamon Cull

Managing Editor
David Castleman

The New Formalist appears in Febuary and August as a Web publication and once a year as a conventional print journal. A two issue subscription to the latter is $20. Please make all checks payable to:

David Castleman
Box 792
Larkspur, CA 94977-0792

Please submit no more than 6 poems at a time. Kindly paste your poems (plain text) onto the body of your E-mail message. Our E-mail address is:

thenewformalist@lycos.com

We do not encourage snail-mail submissions, but if you do not have access to a computer, kindly submit your work to the address below:

The Editors,
The New Formalist
Box 792
Larkspur, CA 94977-0792

© by respective authors.

T.S. Kerrigan

THE ARIA SHE SANG

Her slender fingers struck the keys
those weekend nights the neighbors came
L’amour est un oiseau rebelle,
she sang in that soprano voice,
like some flirtatious femme fatale.

(In dreams, I’ve heard that voice again,
and once, at night, on some boreen
in rural Ireland years ago.
I turned, but no one dogged my steps).
She played when others rose to sing:
“The Minstrel Boy,” “Old Folks at Home,”
(my specialty: “Don’t Fence Me in”).

My father sat behind the rest
and never sang a bar, so ill
at ease he’d often leave to smoke
a cigarette and disappear.
(I hear his failing steps again
tonight in rooms across the hall.
He cries each time I speak her name.
His grief seems unendurable.)

An understanding, unexpressed,
informed their lives. I can’t recall
a soulful kiss, a bold embrace.
and yet they hardly ever fought.
L’amour est un oiseau rebelle.
What wantonness her voice possessed.
But was it love’s extremity
we heard each time she sang those words?
Or was it passion manifest?

THE BRIDGE TO AMERICA

On board the rotting coffin ships
they fingered icons, beads,
invoked the Sacred Heart of Christ,
my Sligo forbears, proud in rags,
with mouths of crooked teeth,
the meek who dared inherit earth.
Unswayed by intimations scrawled
across prophetic winds,
they sought the solitude of stars.
At last a landfall came in view,
a dark expanse of coast,
this brooding New Hibernia.
I picture them on rundown wharfs,
the greenhorns striking out
for Canaans all across the land.
Pretenders to the whirlwind night,
the vast unchosen staked their claims,
the meek who dared inherit earth.

A SIGHTING ON THE RIVER

I

That summer morning years ago
we watched a red-tailed hawk
descending from the pines
across this stony riverbed.
O River, wind us now in light.

His talons clutching writhing prey,
his plumage spread against
a shaft of swirling air,
we saw him slowly rise again.
That circling image calls us back
as strangers now, to drift
beneath these trees, this sky,
to wonder where the river leads.

We tie our rotting skiff along
a fringe of wooded shore,
survey the massive sky
for hours for pinions, talons, beak.

II

A vagrant sun recedes behind
a line of reddened hills.
At dusk, let down and cold,
we slowly row the skiff upstream.
We make our way to camp as night
reclaims the river, pines.
Without a word exchanged,
we pack the old sedan and leave.

We saw a sign among these woods
that morning years ago,
an emblematic bird
abreast of water, earth and sky.
If we can hoard its symmetry
against the whorl of time,
perhaps it was enough
to know that feathered splendor once.
O River, wind us now in night.

Leo Yankevich

ST. MARTIN’S CEMETERY

New Derry, Westmoreland County, PA

Grandfather Lawrence, whom I never knew,
I wonder what appeasing light, if any,
may have eased your pain and strengthened you
as blind and bleeding underneath the many
winding caverns of the hellish earth,
your starved lungs gasping for a final breath,
you prayed for some miraculous rebirth
to justify the agony of death.

But what your friends could rescue from the ground
resembled only contours of a man.
And none dared utter words or make a sound
when Hilda (mother of my mother) ran
and tried to recognize your blackened face,
then covered it with light from her embrace.

PRAISED BE

Praised be the ugly and the beautiful,
the slow decay of leaves, the dew on grass,
the thistles and the apples bountiful.
Praised be the frozen branches in the pass,
the rapids rushing downwards to the spring,
the violets sprouting in the morning light.
Praised be the feather of the broken wing,
the wounded fawn that will not last the night
whose heavy clouds obstruct the moon and stars.
Praised be the hungry lynx and its last prey,
the goshawk flying over woodland scars
before it dives into a sea of grey.
Praised be the fierce light that forever burns,
and life that struggles, dies and then returns.

Aidan Andrew Dun

INSOMNIA

Dead of night. Alone. The distant
murmur of an engine lends emphasis
to a drop of water which becomes
a neighbour’s hammer on the wall.

Serotonin drips down your spine.
The mind is open to every doubt.
Your worst enemy is on the prowl:
the cat burglar of night thoughts.

Sleeplessness is an ancient maze.
In it, we lose the way to ourselves
Mind spins, searching for a centre.
Truth is a far off fountain singing.

Dead of night. The stars crackle.
The streets hum with void music.
Sirens spin through a vast town.
I alone hear. All are sleeping.

I DREAMED MY FUTURE CHILDHOOD TODAY

I dreamed my future childhood today.
Look! In a corner of the pinewood, always,
I stand alone at a curve in the dirt-track
where shadows offer a chance to stay cool,
cradling my guitar like a brilliant infant
crying its ancient messianic song.
Everywhere I see the spirits who come
to listen swaying side-to-side, shimmering,
dancing with the superheated zephyrs
which cross this hill from the blue south.
As hot winds carry pollen they bring gifts,
bitter-sweet melodies from far-off worlds.
And I sing them with my eyes closed,
remembering a birthplace in the zenith.

R.S. Deese

THE LION’S TOOTH

A subtle foot of curling root
A stalk sewn equal to the breeze
A wreath of Lion’s Tooth to cut

The lucky thread of sight that sees
A mirror of the Sun and Moon
Among the grass as tall as trees

This humble flower is the one
The blind of heart still call a weed
One empire cracked and scores begun

By the flight of a single seed.

Andrew Frisardi

ETRUSCAN TOMB: AN INVENTORY

One hand mirror, two amphoras,
Three amphoras, four;
Five figured vases
Arranged around the door;
Six miniature warriors
Recalling heroic lore;
Seven little, eight little warriors,
In bronze, without the gore;
Nine painted musicians
Playing a silent encore;
Ten partying patricians;
And happily, a whore.

APPROACHING TERMINI STATION, I TRY TO REMEMBER THE MYTH OF POPPIES

Anemones have theirs, and ancient women
Would beat their breasts for that delicious red,
But I don't know what story makes these human
Or joins their dribbled brilliance with the dead.

The shock of color must have shaken a myth
From someone once; vermillion in crabgrass
And shattered glass, they are all gist and pith—
Impassioned tragic youth trembling en masse.

I stare dumbly, watching from the train,
As if a word just vanished from my tongue
Before I could speak it. I search my brain
For what’s still left of that unsettling song.

There simply must have been a poet once
Who gave them blood, huge lusts, and breathless hunts.

Jefferson Holdridge

RETURN

I

Of every lawn only ours was open
Convincing us to come, while heavy snow
Fell pre-industrial—our ghosts again—
On rambling acres of woods encircled so

No one came or left. A winter Eden
Proving troubles stop as storm winds blow.
The Puritans had named it Devil's Den;
The only sign that cloven rocks will show.

Inside the forest, an old foundation lies.
Its cellar filled with leaves beside a stream
Whose wet grounds have undone the walls.

A bird sits on a bough, another flies.
A black snake dozes in a mottled beam
And follows where the moving sunlight falls.

II

The shifting sense of home, the force unsettling,
Make this return occur once more
After the absence coiled is ready to spring
From darkened corners, stairs, behind the door.

The poison in our blood now starts to sting,
Where roof and walls have housed another floor,
Dark outlines fading fast, or lingering
Like words that only rhythm can restore.

While walking through the shadows, casting light
Across the hallway, we capture a clear voice
Whose hidden promise feels like an embrace,

We grasp for routine solace as a rite.
It’s now a sharpened solitary choice:
The nail that makes the hand surrender place.

Alan Berecka

LARKIN AT THE REFERENCE DESK

With the hint of an amphibian’s grin
he sank deep into his toad-like day
bemused that even a paltry living
could be made by pointing the way
to water closets and drinking fountains.

Larkin marked his time behind an oaken
desk, near endless shelves, where ancient
voices covered in a shroud of dust, bound
in buckram and leather, whispered a faint
invitation to their forgotten primal song.

Each night the darkened library sat empty,
its keeper moved on past shared drink and food
to letters and poetry and then a deep sleep
where he dreamt that he heard his own crude
bass voice join the one true harmony,
until daybreak when he returned to be paid
to sit behind his desk and point the way.

Edward Wier

SAVAGE LOVE

Bold white words forming in the coward’s mind,
Are nothing; a wisp of smoke, dissolving
Into space. I taste your flesh, going blind;
Feel myself delightfully devolving

Into the garden-jungle, where passions rule;
Here, I paint my face, hunt, and kill to survive,
Chase challengers, and mock the braver fool,
Who tries to prove that he is more alive.

These drab days of image, money, and fame,
Conjure nothing. I pace within my cage;
Weak with explanations, theories, and blame,
Craving colder blood; on the cusp of rage.

Your kind needs my kind and my kind needs yours;
Both rivals and equals; down on all-fours.

Tom Riley

TWO AUTHORS

Hermann Hesse’s the one they all read—
And that Gnostic crap went to each head:
        Each transcended humanity.
        But I found this insanity—
And I read Raymond Chandler instead.

THE SPARTANS’ HAIR

The brave Spartans, they combed out their hair.
Their doom loomed, but they just didn’t care.
        They would be swept away.
        They were grim, but still gay.
And their lice were brave, too, hiding there.

J. Patrick Lewis

JUDGEMENT

Last night I dreamed that Housman was alive,
Dining with Yeats, Frost, Pound and Edward Thomas.
Frost gruffly asked, “Will poetry survive?”
Housman allowed, “Verse has outlived its promise.”
“I think the Second Coming will arrive,”

Said Yeats, “before we see another trope
Magnificent as any that we’ve penned.”
Ezra grunted, infallible as the Pope.
Shy Edward Thomas said, “I recommend
We execute the hangman, save the rope.”

SAPPHIRE

December 13, 1862
Battle of Fredericksburg,
Virginia

Was a mischief dog out of the southern hills
Who owned two tails and one good eye
Who never knew doubt
Who slept through sweet morning light
Who kept a border collie’s borders
Who wept from the one good eye, glistened
from the other, a gibbous moon
Who retched on Johnson grass
Who warmed inexplicably to in-laws
Who worked without pay
Who dreamed in color
Who traded talk with back porch cats
Who feared the yawp of the nighthawk
Who could recite the alphabet in dog
Whose opinion of newspapers was made abundant
Who mistook eccentricity for affection
Who preferred not to
Who, after a dozen wrong turns,
Fell on bitter ground with 12,653 Federals
At Fredericksburg, where a Union soldier said,
"We might as well have tried to take Hell."

Brooke Horvath

ELEVEN AMERICAN POETS WHO HAVE BEEN ON POSTAGE STAMPS

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry’s footprints on the sands of time
Are gone, and done his days on earth.
But Excelsior! even his most horrid rhyme—
Dollar for dollar, he gave us a wad’s worth.

John Greenleaf Whittier

A few wrote poems better shod, even sunnier,
Less snowbound, more maudlin, prettier.
There were tongues and pens that were funnier,
But no one else was Whittier.

James Whitcomb Riley

Benj. Johnson of Boone sat down and cross’t
His legs. His mien serene, he wrote most spryly
Of Orphant Annie, swimmin’ holes, punkin frost—
Yes, he was living the life of Riley.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

“Old Ironsides,” “The Deacon’s Masterpiece”:
He penned some dandy old poems.
To a place in our hearts he once held a lease,
But when it was up, it was we lost our Holmes.

James Russell Lowell

At least once to every man and nation
Comes the June-rare moment when the soul
Is sated with mellifluous celebration
And cannot swallow another poem by Lowell.

William Cullen Bryant

A certain fame even now remains his,
The self-educated and self-reliant
Author of the deadly dull “Thanotopsis.”
Read him and weep. R.I.P., Mr. Bryant.

Edgar Allan Poe

“You’re a necrophile—sadistic, perverse!”
“And you, friend, drink rye by the galleon!”
“What could be worse than such verse, verse, verse?”
“Your stories,” quoth Edgar to Allan.

Emily Dickinson

It is of Itself no dimity Bliss
To read—with marble Tea, ablative Bun—
Disdaining Men, and Oxygen—this
Nobody—this loaded Gun—this Dickinson—

Walt Whitman

I bloom in dooryard, at roadside, on divan
When in my mind’s ear sounds the long, unmetered yawp of
Whitman. (I’ve nothing else to say of him, not one thing—
for it is of myself I would rather sing.)

Ralph Waldo Emerson

His “Brahma” and “Days,” his “Concord Hymn,”
Were once on every tongue, till a shadow
Fell o’er him, and Ralph’s star grew dim,
Leaving us to wonder, Where’s Waldo?

Henry David Thoreau

He set the woods on fire once
While cooking up some fish to go:
The naturalist in the role of dunce
(I added Henry to be thorough).

Ellen Saunders

SAVE THE ANIMALS

At times I think I’ll never eat again,
a piece of pig or lamb or fowl or fish
or smooth, white eggs that sit beneath a hen.
I want it so the food upon my dish
won’t make me think of big brown eyes or heads
of anything that now is dead but was
alive before. My food will come from beds
of green, like beans and lettuce leaves, because
you see, I cannot bear to think of why
the animal must die so I can eat.
Like when I look a lobster in the eye
Then drop it in a pot – oh, what deceit!
You’ve heard me talk like this before but still,
I might forget when steaks are on the grill.

David Castleman

David Gwilym Anthony, TALKING TO LORD NEWBOROUGH, Alsop, 122 Broad Creek Rd, Laurel DE 19956; 66pps, npl.

Leo Yankevich

Joseph S. Salemi, MASQUERADE, c/o Arthur Mortensen, Pivot Press, 505 Court Street 4N, Brooklyn, NY 11231, 88pps, $12.

Contributors’ Notes

David Castleman lives in a shanty in a redwood grove with two improbably conceited cats, listening by evening to John McCormack and Billie Holiday. His poems, tales and imaginatively critical essays have appeared in hundreds of small magazines on both sides of the Atlantic.

T.S. Kerrigan’s poetry has appeared in Southern Review, International Poetry Review, Kansas Quarterly, the Pacific Review, and scores of others. The Inevitable Press has published a collection of his poems entitled Another Bloomsday at Molly Malone’s Pub.

Leo Yankevich’s poems have appeared in scores of small press magazines, most recently in Chronicles, Blue Unicorn, Iambs & Trochees and Ship of Fools. He lives with his wife and three sons in Gliwice, Poland.

Aidan Andrew Dun’s epic poem Vale Royal, (Goldmark 1995) was launched at the Royal Albert Hall, earning him the title Poet of Kings Cross. His second epic Universal (Goldmark 2002) was launched in the USA with a reading at City Lights, San Francisco.

R.S. Deese's poems have been published in AGNI, The Quarterly, and The Berkeley Poetry Review.

Andrew Frisardi is a poet and translator, whose work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic and the New Yorker, among other publications. A native of Massachusetts, he lives in Orvieto, Italy.

Jefferson Holdridge has had poems published by various journals in the States, England, Scotland and Ireland, among which number the Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, Cuirt Journal, Paintbrush and Irish Studies Review.

Alan Berecka resides in Sinton, Texas, with his wife and two children. His poetry has appeared in American Literary Review, Red River Review, Windhover, and New Texas. The Trilobite Press published his chapbook Each Man Has One Life. He earns his keeps as an academic reference librarian.

Edward Wier’s poetry has appeared in The Formalist, Orbis, SPSM&H, Whiskey Island, The Atlanta Review, The Lyric, Troubadour, The Ledge, The Door, Windhover, Acoustic Musician and Guitar Review.

Tom Riley has published well over 700 poems in venues ranging from The Lyric to Light to Anglican Theological Review. He teaches Classical languages and English literature in Napa, California.

J. Patrick Lewis’s poems have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Dalhousie Review, Kansas Quarterly, Light Quarterly and many other journals. He has published thirty-seven children's picture and poetry books to date.

Brooke Horvath’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Missouri Review, Antioch Review, Chicago Review, Boulevard, Michigan Quarterly Review, Tar River, etc., as well as in the 5th edition of Robert Wallace’s Writing Poems and various anthologies.

Archives

Volume V, Number 1
Volume IV, Number 2
Volume IV, Number I
Volume III, Number 2
Volume III, Number 1
Volume II, Number 2
Volume II, Number 1
Volume I, Number 2
Volume I, Number 1

Formal Poetry Publishers on the Web

the sonnet scroll
Light
The HyperTexts
Iambs & Trochees
Expansive Poetry Music Online
Edge-City Review
Candelabrum Poetry Magazine

Poets

Jared Carter
Richard Moore
Jennifer Reeser