August Journal: Tuesday, August 20, 2013
September Journal: Saturday, September 7, 2013
August Journal: Tuesday, August 20, 2013
A day—a night—four inches—dawn creeps
from steamy covers to find the sun
checking out the storm’s mementoes. The
stream can’t decide how to squeeze back down
between its banks. On lower branches
of thorn bushes, plastic bags, beer cans,
hamburger wrappers and half-limp “new
baby” pink balloons, show off. Choked with
mocha, water ripples across the
lower lawn. Where it slowly draws back,
washed out tulip bulbs with shredded leaves
spatter the mud grass. As if the lid
fell from the dumpster, a sour nameless
mix spills up into the bright fresh air.
September Journal: Saturday, September 7, 2013
Like two kinds of time, trees reach out to
the wind marching down from the mountains
with sunset in its swirls of dark hair.
They are here—this here—as they bend and
snap back to flip their leaves upsided
as if no yesterday had weighed them
dry and limp. Those with pillar-like girth
know when also to lean—that other
time, which eyes guarding upstairs windows
have forgot. Eyes remember only
last year’s tree crash across wires, the day
without power, hours of splintering
saws and their oily smoke marching through
windows flung open and reaching out.
Don Mager’s chapbooks and volumes of poetry are: To Track the Wounded One, Glosses, That Which is Owed to Death, Borderings, Good Turns, The Elegance of the Ungraspable, Birth Daybook, Drive Time and Russian Riffs. He is retired with degrees from Drake University (BA), Syracuse University (MA) and Wayne State University (PhD). He was the Mott University Professor of English at Johnson C. Smith University from 1998-2004 where he served as Dean of the College of Arts and Letters (2005-2011). As well as a number of scholarly articles, he has published over 200 poems and translations from German, Czech and Russian. He lives in Charlotte, NC.
Us Four Plus Four is an anthology of translations from eight major Soviet-era Russian poets. It is unique because it tracks almost a half century of their careers by simply placing the poems each wrote to the others in chronological order. The 85 poems represent one of the most fascinating conversations in poems produced by any group of poets in any language or time period. From poems and infatuation and admiration to anger and grief and finally to deep tribute, this anthology invites readers into the unfolding lives of such inimitable creative forces as Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam.
