The Beautiful One’s Ark

by Sher A. Schwartz

A lyric collection of poetry exploring contemporary rural/agrarian life in Eastern Oregon. These poems are rooted in place and season. They explore loss, change, transformation, and inter-species sharing. Celebrating sound and expressing a variety of poetic forms, Schwartz’s poems reveal the poet’s life with hunting dogs, donkeys, birds, and the ever-changing environment.

BONUS: Each printed book will include a QR-Code for access to enjoy recordings of Sher reading select poems from the collection. 

Enjoy a Video of Sher reading from the book:

Early Praise for The Beautiful One’s Ark:

Eastern Oregon is a region often over-looked by the rest of the state, its austere, dramatic terrain far removed from the easy green world to the west. Schwartz stands as its advocate and caregiver. Here is a poet who has clearly taken the time to attend to the living world around her, its prairie and drylands, wide-open horizon and wild creatures. This is a collection written with musical lyricism by someone who understands that healing the land heals us as well.

—Caroline Boutard, author of Each Leaf Singing

From her 200-acre rewilding project near the Columbia River comes the bountiful inspiration for Schwartz’s first collection. The poetry is filled with transformations, of myth, of landscape, of species, relationships, and between the domestic and the wild.

The poet has an eye for the illuminating detail, which she sets to a music all her own, “the lower meadow/ sober purple oboe/ sprays hoarfrost solos,” and in the persona poem, “Wolf Eye,” “we lock eye to eye/ The dog, the girl/ Her brown eye, my golden/ Twining curls and silver tipped fur/ But, I burn…”

She sings of an altered climate’s collision with the world she cherishes and has nurtured. The collection holds a graceful, often witty, call for humans to realize their interconnectedness with nature, all of us sharing space on this fragile ark.

—Kim Hamilton, author of Calling Through Water and Visitation

Every reader will want to be aboard The Beautiful One’s Ark as Noah’s wife saves a drowning dragonfly. This whole collection constitutes a love song to the writer’s husband, their farm, and all the animals on that farm – including some they don’t want. Sher Schwartz celebrates dancing donkeys, dogs in the bed, even the mouse in the outhouse and the feline perpetrator of pigeon murder. Praise be to the country life and a poet who so gracefully puts it into words.

—Penelope Scambly Schott, author of Waving Fly Swatters at Angels

About the Author

Sher A. Schwartz is a published essayist, poet, old time fiddle musician, singer, and retired professor. She was born in Georgia, raised in Virginia, and spent many summers in rural West Virginia with her mother’s family. Her vocal training, beginning at twelve, and later rhythm guitar playing in an old-time string band laid the foundation for the musicality in Schwartz’s poetry. Schwartz has written country and mountain folk songs and composed classical hymns. She lived for many years in a cabin on the beach in Alaska while teaching in the humanities department at the University of Alaska in Ketchikan. Her band Red Hoochie and the Tomcods played at festivals and events around Southeast Alaska.

In 2011, she retired from academic life and moved to Eastern Oregon, where she’s trained and competed with her hunting dogs, and helped restore two hundred acres on an old farm to native grasslands and pollinator plants. Schwartz has continued to perform with the old-timey Sugar Hill Band throughout the Columbia River Gorge though she writes more poetry these days than songs and essays.

You can hear Sher Schwartz voice poems from many different poets, including her own, at her website: sherpoetry.com

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by Mark Thalman

In Stronger Than the Current, Mark Thalman describes the dangerous work of logging in the early 1900’s, and the hardships these Oregonians faced. Thalman then continues the historic journey with poems depicting important historical events: the drowning of Celilo Falls, the hurricane known as the Columbus Day Storm, and the Tillamook Forest Fire—powerful as a hydrogen bomb. Many of the poems reveal how residents are resilient to the weather. Helen McCready keeps a rowboat tied to her front porch because of winter floods. Another person watches goats and uses them as a barometer to predict the daily forecast. The Tillamook feast in their lodges while telling stories of the widow who cannot stop crying. These lyrical poems paint memorable landscapes, Sage grows low so wind can go where it wants—whistling through wire fences.

About the Author

Mark Thalman is the author of The Peasant Dance (Cherry Grove Collections, 2020) and Catching the Limit (Fairweather Books, 2009). His work has been widely published for four and a half decades.  His poems have appeared in the Paterson Review, The MacGuffin, Pedestal Magazine, and Valparaiso Review.  He is the editor of poetry.us.com. Thalman received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon, then taught English and Creative Writing in the public schools for 35 years and is now retired. Thalman lives in Forest Grove, Oregon.

<markthalman.com>

Enjoy a video of Mark reading from the book:

Mark Thalman — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (March 2021)

Early Praise for Stronger Than the Current:

Mark Thalman sets us working in the wet woods of Oregon. We feel the bark, smell the smoke, hear the saws, and watch as “rain glistens like salmon scales/ on the tip of an eagle’s beak.”  These vignettes of the 1920s through 60s relive the beauty and passing of a wilder heritage. I was moved and haunted by “Arlington, Oregon, 1956,” where a boy imagines the Columbia rising behind John Day Dam, his mother telling him, “everything will be under water/ like the castle in your fishbowl.” And I worried, smiled and cheered for Helen McCready of “Mapleton.” Though she loses her prize tulips to the surging Siuslaw, she ties a rowboat to the porch, remains “stronger than the current” and casts for salmon. These well-crafted poems embody the simple, indestructible beauty of Oregon and its people.

—Henry Hughes, Oregon Book Award Winner

These sturdy, brief, plainspoken poems have a distinctive Made-in-Oregon stamp to them. There are logging poems and landscape poems—weather and landscape figure prominently in them—and poems of Oregon history. The Tillamook Burn and Celilo Falls . . . and “Finley’s Pasture” where “Four Belgians, ebony titans, long retired,/ graze the green pasture.” Modest, quiet poems, unassuming, but rich in substance and detail, like a good meal they stick with you.

—Clemens Starck, Oregon Book Award Winner and author of Cathedrals & Parking Lots

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by Doug Stone

Here, Doug Stone, a fourth generation Oregonian, shares his love of Oregon—its places, its seasons, and its people. Through his lyrical and narrative poems, we are led to witness the power of place, the bonds of family, and his tributes to favorite artist and poets—all through the lens of the ubiquitous northwest rain.

About the Author

Doug Stone is a fourth generation Oregonian and lives with his wife amid hop yards and vineyards near the Willamette River in Benton County, Oregon.  In past lives he has worked on a county road crew, been a grocery store clerk, a case worker, and an analyst and a consultant on public policy issues to state governments, AARP, and the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice.

He has won the Oregon Poetry Association’s Poet Choice Award.  His poems have been published in numerous journals and in the anthology, A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford.  He has written two collections of poetry, The Season of Distress and Clarity, and The Moon’s Soul Shimmering on the Water.

Early Praise for Sitting in Powell’s…:

“Here the rain tells the truth about everything it touches.” Combine elegiac Oregon rain with the spareness of Tang dynasty poets, and you get the honest lyricism of Doug Stone where the joy of swallows can write in the sky that “poetry may not save the world/ but reminds me/ the world is worth saving.” And please don’t miss the magnificent tribute to artist Rick Bartow.

—Penelope Scambly Schott, author
A Is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth
(Oregon Book Award) and Lovesong for Dufur

Doug Stone’s collection of poems, Sitting in Powell’s Watching Burnside Dissolve in Rain, is an anthem to Oregon where the author has lived a long and intensely observant life. In addition to immersing the reader in a celebration of nature, Stone also mourns the human interventions such as dams which have lobotomized those ancient voices—the sound of Celilo Falls. He grabs the reader by the collar with “The Wilson River Road”—a nasty stretch of asphalt,/ especially at night, shouldering through the mountains/ like a mean drunk staggering toward the coast. Frequently, his landscape or aspects of the weather take on an unexpected agency: the January sun troubles down/ the left margin of the sky like a misspelled word,/ neither warm nor bright, just wrong (“The Power of Place”). Or, from “Summer Heat on the High Desert:” All day the great animal of heat paces back and forth . . . his sides rise and fall with the twitching breeze . . . And sometimes it is an animal, in another place,/ more dog than he’s been in weeks,/ so complete in his rancid aura,/ oblivious to any human . . . (“Dog Days”). Stone does not flinch from melancholy but also makes room for humor—see “To the Barista at Starbucks Who Told Me Carmel Macchiato Isn’t the Heroine in Two Gentlemen of Verona.” Finally, Stone honors the Masters: Ursula K Le Guin, Rick Bartow, Peter Sears, and through ekphrasis, George Rouault and Marc Chagall, Jan Pienkowski and Leonardo Da Vinci, and, perhaps closest to his heart, an epistolary homage to Du Fu and Li Bai.

 —Rachel Barton, editor, Willawaw Journal

There is pain and there is splendor in these poems, and Doug Stone knows that the task of the poet to study and transform their meeting places. In Sitting in Powell’s Watching Burnside Dissolve in Rain, he has succeeded admirably. Here is a poet who writes in spare, direct language to set real life in motion.

—David Biespiel, Poet-in-Residence, Oregon State University,
author, A Long High Whistle (Oregon Book Award) & Republic Café

Enjoy Doug Reading from His New Book:

Doug Stone — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (Nov 2020)

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Celebrating International Women’s Day, 2015

Edited by Ellen Goldberg

A small group of feminist poets, ranging in age from 15-73, explore what it means to be a woman in the 21st century. Paying homage to the women who paved the path toward freedom and equality, the poets in this collection share their voices as mothers, daughters, survivors, fighters, workers and leaders. These poems come from sometimes hidden, innate human truths. Each poem provides a means to which women can express their rage, frustration and grief, all the while finding the humor, joy and celebration in what unites us all.

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.”  ~ Muriel Rukeyser

Contributing Poets:

Fran Payne Adler • Judith Arcana • Shawn Aveningo • Gail Barker • Judith Barrington • Brittney Corrigan • Pam Crow • Linda Ferguson • Ila Suzanne Gray • Andrea Hollander • Tricia Knoll • Elise Kuechle • Carter McKenzie • Penelope Scambly Schott • Marilyn Stablein • Carlyn Syvanen • Sharon Wood Wortman

The post Of Course, I’m a Feminist appeared first on The Poetry Box.

Poems & Stories of Portland, Oregon

Featuring poems and stories by Matt Amott, Michael Berton, Elijah Cordero, Simon del Valle, Tricia Knoll, M, Carolyn Martin, Shawn Aveningo, Jenean McBrearty, Saron Lask Munson, Denise C. Buschmann, Ci’Monique Green, DE Navarro, Justin W. Price, Ann Privateer, Michael Shay, Brenda Taulbee, Nathan Tompkins, Susan Vespoli, Luke Warm Water, Steve Williams, and John & Mary Massimilla.

We invite you to peruse these pages of poetry and short stories, and discover the unique, quirky, sometimes bizarre and oftentimes wet tales of this town known as Portland, Oregon. Pop open a bottle of micro-brew, join a band, start a compost meet-up group and fall in love with Portland. We sure did!

The post Keeping It Weird appeared first on The Poetry Box.