[Tim Murphy]

We don't often discuss the works of living poets at this site, but we make exceptions for the likes of Wilbur or Hecht or Kennedy. Yesterday the Mercer University Press sent me Catharine Savage Brosman's new book, her tenth collection if I am not mistaken. It is entitled Breakwater, and I have read only a fraction of its 111 pages. So I am going off half-cocked comme toujours.

Ms. Brosman is the poetry editor of Chronicles, where she publishes a number of us, Alfred Nicol, Alan Sullivan, Jennifer Reeser, Paul Lake, me, to name a few. And Chronicles has published a great many other fine poets who are not Spherians, Dana Gioia, David Middleton, David Halitsky, etc. The magazine's concerns are political, paleoconservative, cultural and salvational. I only say this to disclose that Ms. Brosman is my editor. Chronicles has published more than thirty of my poems, and I owe fealty and lealty to its publisher, Dr. Thomas Fleming.

The Mercer Press asked me to blurb Breakwater, and this is what I said.

"George Weigel has described Benedict XVI as "the most civilized person on earth," but Catharine Savage Brosman gives him serious competition. One of the ways I learned to write about the American West was studying Brosman. She is an accurate observer, deft in the deployment of her vast vocabulary. The publication of Breakwater is cause for this Dakotan to celebrate."

Dammit, I can't copy from Catharine's file. Well, I shall laboriously type out the frontispiece.

To Her Book

As Orpheus reaped music with his lyre,
your pages, ripened, harvested in sheaves
well-bound beneath late summer moons on fire,
ride out on tourbillons with live oak leaves.

They'll take their chance--a toy boat in a stream
rain-swollen, torn on rapids or fast-whirled
in eddies, trapped by branches' damming scheme--
impassive, tangled image of the world;

or--kites that sail on an auspicious wind--
they'll find a tethered welcome, adding fact
to promise. Not a line you should you rescind,
respectful of the literary pact.

Farewell, then. May your readers be those birds
which by an Orphic song were freely caught,
embracing as their own the poet's words,
the very shape and countenance of thought.

Brosman is a poet with an immense range. She might be the best free verse writer I know, and as you can see, meter and rhyme are in her quiver. Professor Emerita of French at Tulane, she is a hard core, unashamed intellectual, but she is as much a child of the American West as Larry McMurtry or Cormac McCarthy. I'll get this file in some form from which I can copy/paste. Meanwhile, go to Mercer University Press and buy from the publisher, not from Amazon.

[Gail White]

I might add that about half her books were published by LSU Press and I believe at one time she was a Louisiana resident -- another point for the Pelican State.

[Tim Murphy]

Christ Pantokrator


His right hand raised, its slender fingers curled,
the left hand holding up the holy book,
He offers His salvation to the world
and blessing from the One whom it forsook.


The figure dominates the apse, its cloak
of blue half-open, seeming to embrace
all those who would assume His gentle yoke,
and find redemption in His sacred face.


Reflections from the dome illuminate
with gold the nimbused cross around His head;
below, archangels, Virgin, saints await
the resurrection of the ransomed dead.


His steady eyes appear to turn their gaze
on every viewer—deep, unblinking, dark,
yet luminous and searching as the rays
that light the nave, the covenant’s new ark.


Anonymous, just strangers in a crowd,
like those who stood on a Judean hill
to watch, and heard Him as He cried aloud,
we know the power of His passion still:


the letters come alive, the voice is clear,
as though, through two millennia, we heard
the Christ Pantokrator among us here
proclaim, in words, Himself, the perfect Word.


What of this wonder can I take away—
with photos, and a very human pride?
The palm of life, a soul become the prey
of burning love, the body glorified.

[Jennifer Reeser]

Tim, thanks for this.

[Tim Murphy]

Pike’s Peak, October



The summer was perfection—painted skies,
clouds gathering by four, dark scrolls of rain;
then bursting red that took us by surprise,
projecting sunset to the eastern plain.


And friends from South Dakota, Illinois,
Wyoming, Texas, England came like birds
and perched. We sat al fresco to enjoy
the view, good wine, blue cheese, delight in words.


It’s now October, and the famous peak
by three is pink with horizontal rays
revealing every texture, form, and streak,
a spotlit masterpiece of shorter days.


Though aspen shine still on the Rampart Range,
light snowfall higher up can give me pause,
while colder nights assault the ash, and change
wind-scattered leaves to weak, arthritic claws.


It’s not just nature, since my autumn’s here
already, mellow, though—a ripe caress;
love rediscovered late becomes us, dear,
refining finish of our lives’ finesse.


The mountain’s body takes on shadow, blue
and secretive, as by a lover’s art.
How wild the clouds that crown the peak, how true!
How wide and full the spaces of the heart!

[Tim Murphy]

I'm laughing that the two other poets who have commented on this thread are, like Catharine, Louisianans, and both of them poets whom I have long and seriously admired.

I think what I most love about Catharine is what I most love about Rhina Espaillat. There is a rich wisdom redolent in every page of what they write. They are only two years apart in age (R, 1932; C, 1934.) Oh you should NEVER mention a great lady's age. But in any critical appraisal, a coming to terms with a major artist, it is useful to note, for it puts them in the larger context of the many decades they have toiled at their arts. Biologically, each is old enough to be my mother. And frankly, I despair, I DESPAIR of reaching that level of wisdom. And my objectivity? There is none, for they both serve in loco parentis to this crazed killer of doves.

The Pike's Peak poem immediately above is the sixth and final section of A Colorado Suite. I spent my adolescence in the mixed pine and aspen forests of Minnesota, felling aspens, lopping them, lashing them into signal towers, burning them to boil coffee. But Catharine resides in summer by The Garden of the Gods, near our friend David Mason in Colorado Springs; and the objects of her poems are Colorado's aspens. I see aspens in a new light when Catharine writes of them. I see two treelines, the prairie and the high massifs, separated by bands of gold. My Colorado time has been all winter, for I am a skier. Just consider the subtitles of the Suite. In the Hayman Burn, By the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, In Unaweep Canyon, By the Conejos River, Wilkerson Pass, Pike's Peak, October. I know those places only in winter, and Catharine lets me see the wild flowers of summer, the bronzed autumns when the elk descend the montane meadows in search of winter grazing. So many of her poems hammer home to me the necessity of "accurate observation." That is a Wilbur phrase which he has hammered into my red head since I was twenty-seven. As he once said to Alan and me, "More nature poets need to take your field trips." Those are trips that Brosman has taken, and my insight into the glories of creation are enriched by my acquaintance with her poetry.