For Anne Gregory W. B. Yeats By Norah Christianson For Anne Gregory B. Yeats ‘Never shall a young man, Thrown into despair By those great honey-colored Ramparts at your ear, Love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.’ ‘But I can get a hair-dye And set such colour there, Brown, or […]
By Norah Christianson The Bonnet Shop -Norah Pollard Every Saturday, when I was a child, my mother would take me downtown to The Bonnet Shop. In the show window, hanging down from ribbons, hats floated gay as fairy boats. Inside, hats crowned red-lipped plastic heads or sat on hat-racks like parrots in a tree. Hats […]
By Norah Christianson Happy Mother’s Day! They’ve been many poems written about poets’ mothers, but I love this poem particularly because, though Barker is full of love and admiration for his mother, he does not paint her as perfection itself. She is not someone described in a Hallmark Mother’s Day card. His portrait of her […]
David Wagoner was born on June 5th, 1926 in Ohio and raised in Indiana. In 1954 he moved to the Pacific Northwest, which he recalled as “…a big event for me, it was a real crossing of a threshold, a real change of consciousness. Nothing was ever the same again.” The natural environment of the […]
“Now Let No Charitable Hope” By Norah Christianson “Now Let No Charitable Hope” was written in 1922. Wylie expresses her loneliness, and a dissatisfaction at being a woman in the ’20’s. She does not hope to be like the eagle and the antelope—symbols of freedom. Yet, she implies, she’s had the personality and intelligence to […]
Poetry Corner By Norah Christian Billy Collins was born in New York City in 1941. He is, as the New York Times has called him, “the most popular poet in America,” not only because he is both funny as well as deep, but he is understandable. Poet and critic Michael Donaghy called Collins a “rare […]
First Lesson by Philip Booth By Norah Christianson A father is giving a swimming lesson to his daughter, but (he is a poet, after all) he is speaking in metaphor. He is really telling her how to survive in her life, which is “a long thrash to your island” or her destination, her destiny. He […]
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