Next week Mimi White will read from her book The Last Island, Deerbrook Editions 2008, in San Francisco, CA, May 28th, at Cover to Cover, a friendly community oriented bookstore, 1307 Castro Street.
The Last Island received the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry from the New Hampshire Writers Project in 2009. Here are two favorite poems from the book.
Mimi white also received the Philbrick Poetry Award in 2000, and this is what Robert Creeley said about her winning chapbook, " These are poems of a deceptive quiet and simplicity, just that they make, together, a landscape of painful, almost surreal insistence."
Mimi will also be reading at the Ogunquit Art Museum, Ogunquit, Maine, July 27 @ 7 PM.
In the Mineral Dark
In the cold petals of sleep,
without fear or trepidation,
angels fly. Fastened to whiteness,
fugitive stars guide them
to my empty meadows.
They brush my eyes
with their heated bodies
and forests rise from stone,
the radiant flux of history
written in flecks and swirls.
They trace the mineral dark
with their soft wings
and leaf by leaf trees root
in the freshet of the night.
Blackbird by blackbird,
branches feather
the unfurnished dream.
A small stream rises,
ample, impossibly clear.
Schoodic Peninsula
When the moon hung its nail
at the end of the world
we turned off the lights
and let the stars
replace what we had been saying.
Then a deer (which was once
darkness) stepped
across the road
and became forest
again. If I practice
walking I am footsteps
on the lively fungus.
When I gaze at the white
lichen I am the moon.
When blackberries
print seeds on my lips
I am the sweet season
that houses summer,
fragrant, waiting to close.
