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Lee
Upton
is
the author of four books of poetry, including the recently published
collection
Civilian
Histories,
as
well as
Approximate Darling, The
Invention of Kindness, and No
Mercy, a winner of the National Poetry Series Competition.
In praising her work, The
New York Times Book Review states, "[Upton's] poems about
dreams transform the often mundane quality of life in an overly
materialistic America into something imaginative and spiritual."
Upton
has also written three books of literary criticism, most recently The
Muse of Abandonment: Origin, Identity, Mastery in Five American Poets.
A Professor at the Department of English of Lafayette College,
she lives in Easton, Pennsylvania. |
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The
Broom
Lee
Upton
The
rocks shone like emery boards,
reflective ruins.
Ceremonial without great effort--
like the swaying of a great rope bridge
over a ravine,
or mushrooms that suddenly
pry upward, the size of cabbages,
footstools,
to reveal the tip
of a lost continent,
the way the broom
in a pantry dumbly speaks.
It is a mule of words--
useful for wresting under edges,
unsupplanted,
as if straw were dried fire and a match
a way of watering it.
Because of dead leaves
I can hear
when people walk on my lawn. |
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Volume
I Issue I