Rhina Espaillat on Rattle website
 

A beautiful, heartbreaking elegy by Rhina Espaillat on the Rattle website today: here's the link. So many echoes here, too -- of Marvell's mower, Wordsworth's "oh the difference to me," etc.

Nausheen

Oh, my...

Thanks for posting that one, Nausheen.

Lovely and moving. Rhina always goes straight to the heart of things. I think it is the quality that makes listeners or readers instantly relate to her, though I also think that, in these times of suspicion of emotion in verse, it has prevented her from getting the recognition she deserves from the larger poetry community. Her work speaks for itself and will continue to do so.

Susan

She's mostly writing Alfred poems these days and I barely have the character to read them. They're so good but so painful.

Heartbreaking indeed. A deeply moving elegy.

Coincidentally, Jane just forwarded my Baltimore mail, which arrived this morning &, with it, my copy of Robert B. Shaw's A Late Spring, and After, which examines grief and memory after the death of his wife Hilary.

Regarding both: I wish these poems never had to exist, but I'm grateful that they do.

Nausheen,

Thank you for sharing this link to Rhina's very moving poem.

Thank you! And note on Robert Shaw:
 

Thanks, guys, for the very kind words about my "Shears...".

Ned, I agree with you about Robert Shaw, and would like to let everyone know that he will be here to participate in the Newburyport Literary Festival on Saturday, April 29.

So will Robert Mezey, Cathy Chandler, James M. Wilson, Kevin Carey, and Alexandra Oliver, as well as several of the Powow River Poets: Mike Juster, Midge Goldberg, Deborah Warren, Nancy B. Miller, Dan Brown, Anton Yakovlev, David Davis, Bill Coyle, and David Berman.

What a line-up! I wish I weren't halfway across the country on that day or I'd love to be in the audience. Newburyport is the place to be! Thanks, Rhina...and thank you for your poems.

This surpasses the Beautiful, and enters the Sublime. Brava, Lady. Lucky them.

Jennifer

Alfred would love this elegiac beauty, Rhina! And so do I.

Wish I could be at the Newburyport Literary Festival, and am so glad to see that Robert Mezey will be reading as well. It should be a gala occasion!

Love to you and everyone!

Let me join in the praise of this wonderful and moving poem, Rhina.

Looking at the line-up, I'll be sorry to miss Newburyport. Maybe next time.

RobW

The elegantly simple and cutting trimeter (one can hear those shears), the plainspoken language (especially those last two devastating lines), and the rhymes that weave in and out of the three stanzas like those rampant creepers and tendrils, all come together in this gorgeous remembrance. Jennifer is right. The poem is sublime.