Something to rest on - Review

 

Something to rest on

Stephen R. Wagner, the past Poet Laureate of Amesbury, Massachusetts, served in that position during the 350th anniversary of Amesbury’s incorporation. While he describes his book as “just a short collection of poems written by a poet laureate, as that is what poet laureates do”, I would describe it as an historical collection written to commemorate an historical time and place. The poems range from “An Inspirational Poem” for the mayoral and other city offices swearing-in ceremony, through “Brownie Bridging Ceremony”, and onto The Municipal Series Poems (one of 5 sections) including the “Amesbury Industrial Supply” where

            You could get lost

            But you won’t, unless you want to

            As there is always someone there

            Who genuinely seeks

            To help you.

Stephen says this is his last book of poetry. “I don’t see anything calling me to write further poems, and I don’t write poems for the sake of poetry, so, this will likely be it” His choice, of course, but I for one hopes he keeps on writing, anything for any reason.

Wishing him the best, Ellie O’Leary, current Amesbury Poet Laureate. 

Available through Amazon https://smile.amazon.com/Something-rest-Poems-Laureate-Amesbury/dp/B08CPDLB29/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=stephen+r+wagner&qid=1606239828&sr=8-1

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Free Open Courses

Free Open Courses  Here is a link to Free Open Courses offered by Poetry in America.  Because of a hopefully minor medical problem, I've suspended my original plan of a post a day. I look forward to resuming that in some form, but in the meantime, here is a link to a series of free courses. 
Read more

Up Home Again - the book itself, at last.

Image
·         Up Home Again is the story of a woman who examines her haunting childhood in a beautiful place when she returns to Maine to resolve ongoing personal dilemmas. The book I started in 2006, and finished in 2022, will make its debut as a real book in January 2023. Writing a memoir isn't easy; for me it became excruciating. Parts I and II have been done for a long time, but for the last bit, Part III, I had to pull myself together in order to do the same for my book.  In 2004 I returned to Maine, my life eroded after cancer, divorce, bankruptcy, and then cancer again. In 2006, living alone and painfully lonely, I started this book in a memoir class at the Belfast (Maine) Senior College. For years I've said I'm writing a memoir. I tried lots of ways to finish it. New notebooks and pens, changing the way my desk faced, writing retreats, and writing other things including poetry - a lot of poetry. When my poetry manuscript started the process of publication, I mentioned
Read more

Make Your Own Adventure

And now it comes to this . . .  We are at the final day of National Poetry Month 2022. Thank you to all who stuck with me -- writing poems, trying to write poems, reading the blog posts, and especially those who read at our monthly poetry reading on Zoom. New Jersey, New York. and New England were all represented. Going forward from the end of the month to the beginning of new writing, the next challenge is to make your own poetry, including your own poetic forms. You can actually invent a form or tweak a form. I was once teaching a weekend workshop at a retreat center and there wasn’t a lot of time to write so I came up with the “villanellie”. It’s a shorter version of the villanelle and kind of named after myself, but that part is just coincidence. The villanellie is a villanelle with three tercets instead of five. That gave the participants the opportunity to have a completed work in less time. A mentor once assigned a prompt that was something like “write a poem in twelve sen
Read more