Moth

Poems

Jane Springer

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780807167946
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women in Poetry
• Index: Literature

In Moth, Jane Springer uses shaped poems, prose poems, and poems with unusual structures to soar through time and the natural world. Yet, while her lines are aesthetically playful, she examines serious subjects, including our destruction of the environment, the widening and divisive gulf between socioeconomic classes, and the further injustices thrust upon those already suffering in society. She focuses on the role of women in a chaotic world, as mothers, daughters, and sisters work to restore order and comfort. Simultaneously heartbreaking and lighthearted, these masterful poems gracefully delve into the complexities of our lives.

Swallow

In the gulf between us sinks a parish of Sherman’s burned plantations

& the hoary school of no books, Sex Ed, Foreign Language,

no Music or Art, Math taught only odd years, we never get to square

root, records say that’s fault of white flight driving our peers to

private quarters when integration longbows past the town of Newellton.

In Upstate NY they’re villages—towns, where the school board

votes in new auditoriums, Olympic pools to serve public good. I’d like

to thank Mr. Prince for whirling a winged eraser upside our heads,

for passing notes that said ‘T stirs the best fuzzy navels, but

Avondree eclipses his strut,’ as erasure renders portraiture more

clear: It’s Bob Burns’ family who blasts illegal DDT from crops

to gullet to dead birds flanking flyspeck highways, they own all

tillable land, we can rent it, or work it for wages of Mexican migrants,

whose kids stomp cotton while Future Farmers of America serves

as class to cancel Spanish & we suffer essays on the best speed limit

to ‘Stay Alive, Drive 55.’ The pearled librarian from my

new Upstate locale pokes fun at this trivia: ‘Well Louisiana, you can

understand’—& you can! You get the distinction continually

drilled in here: North as worthy, South as punishment—the way you

get why not to mix Crown Royal w/ 2 dollar wine, or how by

detasseling corn too far down the stalk you get a fistful of spikes. It’s

an unforgiving 99 degrees & no AC in a hotbox we’re so used to

we don’t bother wasting money on the . . . joules? it takes to turn fans

or replace the faltering façade, foundation, roof over Newellton

High School, XZY school on the scale of students deserving address.

Thank you, Mrs. Frazier, for teaching how to etherize frogs &

keep them pinned while scalpel-ing, dissections teach us to poke our

subjects gently—as in the gulf between us exists 21 distinct

grouper species, classes dwindled as our downstate uncles fishing the

coming omen of oilspills & aunts, suspended on premonition’s

bridge—a hurricane, though we don’t know the name yet for babes

tossed to the Gulf’s arms, rocked in the salt waves, the song

sargassum makes feathering them, waked, changed. Thanks, Mrs. Hall,

for ‘Thanatopsis,’ from the Yale Book of American Verse:

‘. . . . . . . . . . . . . ....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Whooo Whooo
• The Ghost, the Driver, the Martyr
• Salt Map
• Letter from the North Country
• Gulf
• Winter Reading
• Velvetleaf
• One Late Bee
• Paper
• Swallow
• Pink
• Calling Home
• Gasoline Psalm
• Moth
• Buffalo Escape Gem Farm, Get Shot
• Dear Eurydice,
• On Finding the Lost Scissors
• Woo
• Squeezbox
• Wha Wha Pedal
• The Rock
• The Mamas
• Stranger’s Song
• Lilacs
• Wind
• Afternoon Clean
• No Bogeyman Tonight
• Walk
• Plush
• Lo Siento, the Only People Who Know Where Lake Conasauga Is Live There & Aren’t Telling
• Upon Pouring Tabasco on the Variegated Thyme to Save it from the Chipmunk
• Acknowledgments