Moira Egan
has an MFA from Columbia University, where James Merrill chose her manuscript for the Austin Prize. Her first poetry collection, Cleave (WWPH, 2004), was nominated for the National Book Award and was a finalist for ForeWord Book of the Year.
Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals including Barrow Street, Measure, Notre Dame Review, POETRY, and Prairie Schooner, and in the anthologies Best American Poetry 2008; Kindled Terraces; Lofty Dogmas; Sex & Chocolate; and Discovering Genre: Poetry.
Work has appeared in translation in Nuovi Argomenti and Lo Straniero (Italy) and in Hbula Stirati (Malta). La Seta della Cravatta, a bi-lingual edition of her poems, will appear in Italy in 2008.
She lives in Rome with her husband, Damiano Abeni, with whom she co-translated Un mondo che non può essere migliore: Poesie scelte 1956-2007, a substantial selection of poems by John Ashbery (Sossella Editore, Italy, 2008).
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Sleeplessly: Sapphics
(After a conversation with Jenny Factor)
Sapphics clipping busily in my brainstem
trip the wiring. Mystery how this rhythm
keeps my sleeping (Tantalus’ grapes retreating)
wispy and distant.
Turning, tossing, chamomile notwithstanding,
how I love sidereal music’s keening.
Darkly listen: nightingale song or bat trill
echoes my longing.
Daytime’s masquerade falls away like clothing.
Naked, brazen, Lady Godiva’s wardrobe’s
all that covers me and my sleepless psyche.
Pick up the pencil.
Darkling ars poetica of the evening,
let me see subliminal pictures clearly.
Muse me, let insomnia’s pure gestation
bring me a poem.
Bar Napkin Sonnet #8
(A bouts-rimés riffing on Shakespeare’s #138)
(Though poets lie in service of the truth
and fiction’s simply truth tricked out in lies,
what do I tell my students, whose sweet youth
does not allow for gritty subtleties?
That I commit the crimes of one still young
and too immortal to obey what’s best
for organs such as liver, heart, and tongue?
I keep my wild-hair story-box suppressed
(I love my kids) and though I feel unjust
I hope they’ll understand me when they’re old
enough to see that love’s a blinding trust
that lives, or doesn’t, once the lie’s been told.
Therefore I lie to them, so I can be
a part of them, and yet hold on to me.)
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