Kelly Cherry - Poetry

Kelly Cherry has published nineteen books—most recently, The Retreats of Thought: Poems (LSU, 2009)and Girl in a Library: On Women Writers & the Writing Life (BkMk, 2009)— eight chapbooks, and translations of two classical plays. She was the first recipient of the Hanes Poetry Prize, given in recognition of a body of work, and recently received a Rockefeller Foundation grant to work on a book-length poem that she expects to be in progress for some time. “A Lyric Cycle,” from her first book of poems, appears in the original and in a new Latvian translation on the 2009 studio recording of Imants Kalnins’ Fourth Symphony (released by Upe tuviem un tāliem) for which it serves as the text of the last movement.

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The Loveknot

On the couch—

baby mice stillborn,

would-be twins

clutching each other

as if either

could save his brother.

The size of thumbs,

tails still curled.

Two Q’s

spelling nothing.

Spelling it twice.

“Lovelily”

Adverb. With which Virginia Woolf describes

the flight-fatigued birds, how they “came descending,

delicately declining, dropped down and

sat silent on the tree”—an elm grown tall—

and on a wall. . . .Or is the word a typo?

But never mind, for does it not call forth

whole acres of lovely lilies in bloom, a kind

we’ll call love lilies, stems and petals swayed

by breezes, like a woman’s blowing skirt

or like her hair when, after love, she rises

from the bed and glances in the mirror

to see what changes have been worked on her,

and isn’t she changed, become somebody else,

more knowing, more aware of who she is?

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Kelly Cherry - Poetry

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