I had driven to Nashua to look for farmhouses. I was researching abandoned farmhouses and wanted to find a part of New Hampshire with both rural and urban poverty.
When his beloved Sophie died, Novalis Lay by her grave and wept himself to sleep. On the third night she met him in a dream. He woke transformed, longing for the last trance, “When sleep shall be without waking.”
In Germany, I began to experience what it was like to think in another language. Also, the way Germans looked at me—with curiosity but no racial baggage—was so different than Americans. I began to understand a little bit more about my own country and how I fit in or not.
Claudia Emerson, who died in December 2014, had come to be known as a poet capable of revealing startling discoveries inside quiet, quotidian circumstances. Her poems are set mostly in Southern rural and small-town scenes, moments in ordinary lives that would normally elude anyone else’s attention.
Just as a swarm pours from a hollow rock In one long beeline for the wild thyme, Alighting in clusters on this purple and that, But is stricken with a mass amnesia That disorients the compass of the sun,
Deep in the wood where things escape their names, Her childish arm draped round the fawn’s soft neck (Her diffidence, its skittishness in check, Merged in the anonymity that tames), She knits her brow, but nothing now reclaims The syllables that meant herself.
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