Home » Reading & Literature » Poetry » The Language of Dreamers

The Language of Dreamers

© Kay Day

The latest anthology from the Athens Avenue Poetry Circle is dedicated to "poets who dream." The works of these poets come across as tangible, made of the stuff of dreams, yet crafted with sure mastery of the genre.

Poetry, when it is done well, produces a response that takes the brain on a path heretofore not tread, but by a unique and individualized means. I purchase and receive many books of poetry, as might be expected of one who hears poetry in the head day and night. Some books I return to again and again, as you would visit a favorite friend. Others I skim across and shelve. The new Athens Avenue, A collection of Poetry, belongs to the friendly group.

I began to read this book while I was on vacation. The first poem in the book is about death. When I returned from ten days of bliss, I came home to news that someone I loved very much had died in my absence. That evening, I read Wendy Carlisle's poem, "Another Question About Dying". The poem begins with an element poets are taught to never use.

The meat of the first line is a question: How does it go after you die? Carlisle winds through the one stanza poem with a series of personal and extraneous images-that she can't abide the heat, the atmosphere curdles, something as mundane as breakfast. She ends with an image that sticks in the mind, the heaviness of air. It is a lovely poem, and it comforted me. Ms. Carlisle's work is lean and tight, compressed to the point of implosion. Yet it is gentle and familiar, taking solid images and bending them so that the result is anything but commonplace. The sound in this poem is so pleasing that, when I read it, I picture a solitary figure on a stage in a soliloquy that is the stuff of high drama, emotional, yet controlled so that the emotion occurs in ourselves when we hear it. All of Carlisle's poetry has that quality; all of it has a sound that is pure.

Paul Kloppenborg offers a diverse selection of poetry, and many of his works go outside the realm of conventional form and meter. The poem, "We Alive Being", explores the cycle of life in a succinct, no frills context:

we alive being
seasons are
life between God

The final lines, with sparse syllabication, bring the poem full circle to a revelation:

The copyright of the article The Language of Dreamers in Poetry is owned by . Permission to republish The Language of Dreamers in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.