[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.