Poet of the Week Archive: July, 2006

July 3 - 9, 2006: Carolina African American Writers Collective

The Carolina African American Writers' Collective (CAAWC), based in Raleigh, is a workshop and readers' group consisting of poets, fiction writers, dramatists, essayists, journalists, children's writers, graphic artists, publicists, photographers, teachers, librarians, archivists, and editors who meet monthly to critique one another's work, read and discuss books by African American authors, and share information about the literary scene. CAAWC also serves as a literary and cultural arts liaison for the community.

Members of the Carolina African American Writers' Collective are currently featured in major anthologies, editions of national literary journals, newspapers, and magazines. Some of these publications include Fertile Ground; Dark Eros; Catch the Fire!!!; The Saracen; BMA: The Sonia Sanchez Literary Review; African American Review; FYAH; and PoetryBay. The Collective has been featured at Page One Festival of the Book; the North Carolina Literary Festival; the Bimbe Festival; the Virginia Festival of the Book; the National Black Arts Festival; the Festival For The Eno; the Hayti Heritage Center; the North Carolina Museum of History; and at bookstores, schools, colleges and universities, libraries, and cultural arts centers. Mendi Lewis Obadike arranged a major CAAWC reading in 2001 as part of the Dialogue Among Civilizations Through Poetry (a United Nations-affiliated event). In addition, the collective has been featured on television and radio programs, including WSHA 88.9 FM radio station. Members often teach writing at colleges, universities, community centers, prisons, public schools, libraries, conferences, and writers' workshops and retreats.

I began planting the seeds for a writers' group in 1989. I met Janice W. Hodges that spring in an advanced poetry writing class taught by Gerald W. Barrax, at North Carolina State University. Janice and I were the only two African Americans enrolled in the class. We began to talk about our experiences and how we turned them into poetry. A few weeks after the class began, I told Janice that I was planning to start a writers' group for African Americans. Three years later, in February 1992, I sent letters to Janice W. Hodges, Carole Boston Weatherford, Jaki Shelton Green, Beverly Fields Burnette, and Cynthia Guinn inviting them to participate in a critique group that would meet at my house at 7:00 on the third Wednesday of every month. For a few months, Beverly Fields Burnette was the only writer who attended.

That summer, Nayo Barbara Malcolm Watkins hosted a Carolina African American Writers' Collective meeting at her house in Durham. Then in the fall, CAAWC convened again-this time at the Hayti Heritage Center, also in Durham. Although the organization struggled in its early days, Jerry W. Ward, Jr., continually encouraged me to keep working with CAAWC. In 1995, the collective experienced much growth. Nudged by Afefe L. Tyehimba (formerly known as Lana C. Williams), former CAAWC president, I sent a letter to former and prospective members, informing them that I would host a critique meeting on Saturday morning, August 12, at 9:30 am. Since then, CAAWC has been meeting monthly, breaking only for the summer months. At present there are 40 members; and more writers are on the collective's waiting list. Members travel from as far away as Virginia, Ohio, Georgia, and elsewhere to attend CAAWC meetings.

Today L. Teresa Church, our archivist and membership chairperson, spreads the word about CAAWC and arranges readings for us at major festivals. The collective awards an annual series of prizes recognizing two writers for service to the state and to the national literary communities. Gina M. Streaty is the editor of The CAAWC Newsletter, which is distributed throughout the country and abroad. Stay tuned as the Carolina African American Writers Collective sends shockwaves throughout the literary world. -Lenard D. Moore

Lenard D. Moore was the featured "Poet of the Week" from June 26th through July 2nd. His work appears in the archive on this web site. This essay appeared in different form in BMa: The Sonia Sanchez Literary Review. The following links will take you to more information about the Carolina African American Writers Collective:

• http://www.poetrybay.com/spring2001/spring2001_22.html
• http://aar.slu.edu/
• http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~delancfe/5-2Spring_00.htm
• http://authors.aalbc.com/fertileground.htm

Dust-Black People Blues
            by Gina Streaty

In New Orleans
shoes don't scuff
pavement
or stir gravel
No more magic
Even Jesus wades
in water.

Ruins gather
where high heels
once raked sidewalks,
danced holes in light,
Florsheim's flounced
like zephyrs,
teased grins
from gangly girls.

Lies from abstract men
spill like floods
from broken levees
as tears dry up
like hope
as irony pleads
for water,
bread, diapers
for babies
and the aged
on wheelchair
alters.

Black forms
hunched on filthy floors,
phantoms weep in attics
and refrigerated trucks
ten days under a cobalt sky.

My TV sings
(so as above, so below)
the dying and the dead
dust-black people blues.

Gina Streaty is a writer, poet, lecturer, editor of the CAAWC Newsletter, and a contributing writer for The Independent Weekly. She earned a B.A. from the University of Maryland and an M.A. from Duke University. Her work has appeared in anthologies and literary journals, including BMa: The Sonia Sanchez Literary Review, In Our Own Words, Vol. II, The Saracen, Voices, Black Arts Quarterly, The News & Observer Sunday Reader, Windhover, and Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art. A separate collection of poetry earned her the 2001 National Zora Neale Hurston Literary Award.

NaTivE raDiuS
      (for willie perdomo)
             by Ebony Noelle Golden

radius- a long, prismatic, slightly curved bone,
the shorter and thicker of two forearm bones,
located on the lateral side of the ulna.
-Webster's New College Dictionary

merengue flesh
concave belly  serpentine
lip    east harlem
sketch flame  mouth like

cool lava   got skin
moonlight wrestles
                     poems nest in neck

                                 crinkles knee joints
                                        hallelujah
                                 crackle of laugh poems

i know how
           velvet mamas
rest under hips and torso
of men who flip music off
alabaster teeth  chiseled pelvis

I know the fingers
           and palm of men
who prism poems
           out concrete orb

con adobos
           con sangre
           con el cuerpo de todos
cosas importantes en el mundo

           you are earth tangent
          bend of forearm
           eye gaze

eres el indigina que camina
en la tierra   the pull and push of nomo
           itch and grab of right wordedness

the retrofire fandance
that craters this plane
           shave and (re)contour
of globe speak

A native of Houston, Texas, Ebony Noelle Golden is an experienced choreographer, actor, and writer. She has worked with the world-famous Ensemble Theater as a choreographer. She also served as a writer-in-residence with Texas Southern University's Project Graduation and Project Row House's summer arts program, in Houston's third ward.

Ms. Golden has an MFA in Poetry from American University, in Washington, DC., and has served as a writer-in-residence for D.C. Writers' Corps and Montgomery Community College's Young Writers' Workshop. She has studied with Willie Perdomo, Saul Williams, Ruth Forman, Henry Taylor, Ishmael Reed, Lenard Moore, among many other artists, activist, and teachers. She has been awarded fellowships by the Atlantic Center of the Arts, Voices of Our Nations, and Soul Mountain Retreat Center.

Ms. Golden is an Instructor of adult basic skills and English at Vance-Granville Community College. She continues to serve the community as a volunteer with SpiritHouse and Peace Fire Art Gallery. Her first poetry collection, mama's hieroglyphics, will be published by her grassroots literary press, betty's daughter.

For more information about Ebony or to book her for a performance or workshop, please visit www.myspace.com/mamashieroglyphics or email her at goldendharma@yahoo.com.

Back where I come from
            by DeLana Dameron

If you travel to South Carolina's Low Country,
the scent of magnolia trees' blossoms
will guide you. If fall Mecca,
follow calls of crushing
waves against dunes during daunting hurricanes -
they threaten then (and battle scars still mark some houses).

Go down to the Southeastern crux,
to a city once served as harbor of souls sold centuries back,
now home of Geechy and Gullah and Southern drawls.
Slide past Rainbow Row
towards the water where you may hear
echoes of the Civil War's beginning on Fort Sumter.

Beyond the Wax Museum and haunted mansions -
I've heard stories, I swear - lies Meeting
Street. It'll take you straight there: a mile from
the ocean, where way back when, our ancestors
kept watch of oncoming white sheets, floating down stream,
bringing bondage in bowels. But you can't see that now.

Go past old plantations, just there,
beyond the bridge, you'll find it -
Grandma's white house in black neighborhood.
Such a dainty little thing; my haven.
I'll leave the gate open. Come on up to the porch.
If you stay for a while, I'll tell stories of how I got here.

A native of Columbia, South Carolina, DeLana Dameron is a third-year student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, concentrating on African and Middle Eastern histories. She has been a member of the Carolina African-American Writers' Collective for two years. She was named a fellow this summer at Cave Canem -- one of nine CAAWC members claiming that distinction.

Offspring
            by L. Teresa Church

Baby Girl
in pink ruffles
and patent leather.
Daddy
swears I twinkle
in his eye.

On Sunday strolls
Mama calls Brother
her little man.
Around his small hand
she makes a tight fist.

To our parents,
we are lumps of gold.
Looking back,
imagine their wails
if they'd
come home
from the fields, at dusk
two hundred years ago,
to learn Brother and I
had been sold.

L. Teresa Church lives in Durham and is a native of Virginia. She is a playwright, freelance writer, quilter, poet, library professional, and member of the Carolina African- American Writers Collective. "Offspring" appeared originally in The Saracen Literary Magazine, published at Hampton University. Ms. Church's work has appeared in many other publications: Southern Theatre; Fertile Ground; The Saracen Literary Magazine; BMa: The Sonia Sanchez Literary Review; Word and Witness: One Hundred Years of North Carolina Poetry; Sauti Mpya: The Literary Magazine of the Sonja Haynes Stone Black Cultural Center; Exquisite Reaction; Moonwort Review; Nocturnes (Re)view of the Literary Arts; Drumvoices Revue; and Black Arts Quarterly. In 1989, Ms. Church won the North Carolina Arts Council's playwrights fellowship for her third play, One Day When I Was Lost. She has degrees in English and English/Creative Writing from Radford University and Brown University, respectively. She also holds a master's degree in library science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Voz: Mamá
            Psalm 119: 105-109

            Your word is a light to my feet and a light to my path
            my mother welcomes angels to enter
            private chambers fill her up with holy spirit touch
            she cannot speak of you father without crying
            golden glow floated her high

            only a child never to delight in flesh
            I have sworn and confirmed that I will keep
            secrets that spill from veils too thin to cover
            heart ache God is no carpenter
            rough hands chafe such smooth skin

            joseph's lilies have died only the staff remains
            my mother weeps yet she guards still
            your righteous judgments. I am afflicted very much
            swords rise above her heart i see it coming
            no lamb survives among lions forever

            she waits for dawn angels and prays
            for dusk spirits to fill this empty female shell i stole
            all youth fire she grew in my birth
            Revive me, O Lord, according to your word.
            she trusts you too much rivers rise

            her form curved into my height
            wind brushing her back forgive me father
            i walked away from groping arm she did not look up
            but blindly searched someday she will walk alone
            Accept, I pray the freewill offerings of my mouth,

            O Lord, and teach me your judgments.
            My life is continually in my hand.
            hers she trusts to you always
                                                             Amen.

Raina J. León, a Cave Canem fellow and member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, is currently a doctoral student in education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her poem "Voz: Mamá" is part of a series that appeared in the spring, 2005 issue of Furnace Review. She is founder and curator of the Touchstones Open Mic and Reading Series and head of program/workshop facilitator for the High School Literacy Project, which runs through the Research Triangle Schools Partnership and the School of Education at UNC-CH. Her work has been featured at Cornelia Street Café, Nuyorican Poets Café, Bowery Poetry Club, through readings with the LouderArts Project, and in AntiMuse, Furnace Review, Farmhouse Review, Constellation Magazine, the anthology Poetic Voices without Borders ( Gival Press), and Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade. Her poetry manuscript, Canticle of Idols, has been a finalist for the Cave Canem First Book Prize and received honorable Mention in the Andres Montoya poetry prize competition.

July 10 – 16, 2006: Shelby Stephenson

There is this about good poets -- once you've heard them perform, then their voices stay with you, and you hear the music of their speech, the rhythm of their song, when you read their poems. I feel that way about Shelby Stephenson. I can pick up any of his books, and hear that music. Like Fred Chappell and Kay Byer he has the earth, the sky, and the people of his land in his poems. In Shelby's case the land is the Coastal Plain of eastern North Carolina -- the area in Johnston County, around Benson, where he grew up. I can hear Shelby's voice, and I can close my eyes and hear Shelby and his lovely wife, Linda ("Nin" he calls her) singing and playing their instruments. Shelby's not just a poet; he's a presence.

I can hear his sly humor in Possum, the wonderful book of poems that won the Campbell-Brockman Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society just last year. I can feel his deep affection for his rapidly disappearing world in that lovely chapbook, Finch's Mash, published by St. Andrews Press in 1990. All the way through his work is his love of family and the abiding presence of his father, William Paul Stephenson, the subject of his 1990 chapbook, The Persimmon Tree Carol.

Yet for all Shelby's nostalgia and abiding love for the world of his childhood, there is about his poetry and about him an extraordinary energy that keeps his poems rooted in the present even as he writes about the past. He and his poems are so alive. Like Possum, he may be down, but "a cry and whelp and he was up again." Shelby Stephenson is one of our state's treasures. He was presented the North Carolina Award for Literature by Governor Michael Easley in 2001. May he be "up again" and again for many more years.
-- Anthony S. Abbott

Anthony S. Abbott began teaching English literature at Davidson College in 1964. He is a widely published poet. His novel, Leaving Maggie Hope, won the Novello Festival Press Award for 2003. His most recent collection of poems, The Man Who, was featured on this web site in March, 2006.

The Ugly Changes

Possum thought of the farmer's plight−
It shut him out of the barn and left the nubbins to the weevils.

He saw it caterpillaring
Farmlands to developments.
He saw its sewage pouring into the creeks and rivers.
He climbed up into his dear persimmon and watched.
He saw its exhaust drifting over memories of corn and cotton
And its fires fringing the embers in the stumps.
He climbed higher, squinched his eyes narrowly to make out
           what he thought he could see.

Possum saw it scooping whole fields.
He saw its blade brimful with topsoil.

He climbed clear in his persimmon and glared.

He saw it licking the countryside, suburbs, towns,
Like the sagging nipples of the dog
Separated from her puppies.

A boom quickened the dizzying earth.

Its time had come and gone.
What was left was a desert in the once rich Coastal Plain.
There were no houses, no hammers glinting in the sun, no builders, no people.
Possum nosed down the one spared tree and blinked.

I whisper to the holly. . .
There is a prickly answer−stark,
And dark, a red-berried
History of cleared woods.

I whisper to the persimmon. . .
My grin spreads into babble.
Is that a haint?
Herself her own figure
She dances to be separate,
Till her motions pale like a reflection displaced from rain
And I feel my own invisibility−

I rub my eyes
Trying to heed
The noise that accompanies
Stillness.

Timber, in the deep forest,
Makes me so sick with fear
I am afraid to hear my feet make one step more.

Possum saw it.
He saw it moving whole pavements,
Countrysides worked into concrete.
He saw roads burning dust.
He slid in gravelly-run eddies.
The rocks started to suck.

He paddled the wrinkling water.
Like a pricked balloon he fell into himself and cried
How his time had come.
The sandy ends of crop-rows, paths. . .
Shopping malls.

Etching

As the pear blossoms trailed springdust
And the abelia swayed
Bees buzzing through the pages of Keats,
The honeysuckle fingered the roadbank
And the turtle labored to port an egg under eaves of the maintenance building.
The bluebird beaked pinestraw to her house.
The redbellied hung a drum
And the chickadee pranced and preened in the nutgrass.
The nuthatch, upsidedown, pounded and pecked the walnut.

The rose-hued finch puffed in the thistlebud.
The breeze peered from the skirts of hedges.

His climbing rose was thorny on the splitrail.
"Hang it," his cloak had many colors from trellising along,
All his children and children's children gone to fields
Without markers, bones lying in the sun,
Running shadows shrunken all out of places he knew.

My body quivers
And the light hairs blow
Under my belly, as a slave tries to say something,
The old fieldrock I am tapping
Trying to find a language,
My pea-brain moving in my skull, my claw and thumb,
Chattel and human in the old field cemetery.
I am clearly writing my crawl.

A bluebird on the soldier's stone
Shakes its voice in the silent pounding of my heart
Every time the mallet strikes the chisel.
Ten-thousand years have rained on my rock.
I keep etching.

New Ground

There in the hedge
O heartshaped leaves−
And the dogwood gnarled
Long with cowrubs and
Yellow
Haloes on the yarrow−
Heavy roses
Dancing half in and out,
Pleated flowers twine scarlet to pink to be
Seeded and eaten by mourning doves,

A blink,
A dot of dew on a thorn,
A rose's link with birds of yore,
A rocking cradle,
A thing to be
As growing is
A seed in furrows
A soiling fields.

The Seeded Row

                I

The love that flowers
The grief my body grooms
Leaves me to root the seeded row.

The point deepens into furrows,
The new ground

Coming in chunky clods,
Granules,
A stream of sand fine as salt,

The mules' traces loped
And relaxed
About the same pace

Down every row and back
My brogans losing paint splotches
Dropped in winter's odd hours as grit
Cleanses those shoes
Walking the turning land
Playing out dreams
Down every row
And back again
Back in my shoes

Between ends to think
What peavines will grow in the loam,
What fertilizer I will bring to the seedbeds,
What appetizers I will take to my wife
When I park the plow under the mimosa,
Sit down on the shank, take the icewater from her

Hands, feel the lettering on the Mason jar,
Drink the long, cool
Swallowing−

Mushrooms
Among spores
Pulling and weeding, needing

Mushrooms
Umbrellashapes, agrarian fungi
Edible as sprung proverbs

Mushrooms
Gathering pulpy gerunds
To flatten an earthy matrix

Mushrooms
Through folds in a boring hush−

If my body over the earth
Lays pleasure
Bowing grass under the willow
My heart hovering a dream
Growing the earth over my body
The willow my bride lying down.

                II

The sun boughs down the longleafpine,
Kissing sleet enough to warm the heart;
Light parades around a line.

Hollybushes crinkle honeysuckle vines;
The hedgerow parts;
The sun boughs down the longleaf pine.

Lovers mime
Pleasures in fits and starts;
Light parades around a line.

They dine
On grapes so tart,
The sun boughs down the longleafpine.

Some tongue a tine
The sun can sear apart;
Light parades around a line.

You, my only you, come to wine.
Hills pop;
The sun boughs down the longleafpine.
Light parades around a line.

Shelby Stephenson grew up on a small farm near Benson, in the Coastal Plain of North Carolina. He says: "Most of my poems come out of that background, where memory and imagination play on one another. My early teachers were the thirty-five foxhounds my father hunted. The trees and streams, fields−childhood−those are my subjects." After leaving the farm for college, he was graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (where he also studied law), the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He has worked as a radio and television announcer, salesman, right-of-way agent, and farmer.

Mr. Stephenson is now professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, where he has edited Pembroke Magazine since 1979. The state of North Carolina presented him with the 2001 North Carolina Award in Literature. He has received the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Memorial Award, the North Carolina Writers' Network's Randall Jarrell/Harperprints chapbook prize, the Bright Hill Press chapbook award, and the Brockman-Campbell poetry prize. In addition to a poetic documentary entitled Plankhouse (with photographs by Roger Manley), he has published Middle Creek Poems, Carolina Shout!, Finch's Mash, The Persimmon Tree Carol, Poor People, Greatest Hits, Fiddledeedee, and Possum, from which the first two poems that appear here are drawn. (Bright Hill Press published Possum in 2004.) The remaining poems presented on this web site are from his manuscript Paul's Hill, for which he is seeking a publisher. With his wife, Linda, he has made two musical CDs -- "Hank Williams Tribute" and "Stephenson Brothers & Linda Sing the Old Songs." Shelby and Linda live on the farm where he was born.

July 17-23, 2006: David Manning

After reading just a few of Dave Manning's poems, I knew this was a voice I would follow anywhere. Whether it is one of his quiet, meditative poems, a passionate love poem, or a humorous poem, his poems illuminate the world in ways that reveal things we have never noticed and transform the familiar into the strange and wondrous. He is a poet whose keen mind and compassionate heart closely examine the world, his own life, and what it means to be fully alive. He is fearless in both his scientific and philosophical inquiry and in his faith that informs all his poetry.

His skill as a poet is equaled only by his work ethic and support of other poets. Twice before, in 1996 and 1998, he won the North Carolina Poetry Society's Poet Laureate Award - the most prestigious of the society's awards. In 2004, NCPS honored Dave's long-time and faithful service by dedicating the annual anthology of award-winning poems, Pinesong Awards, to him. His commitment to the society ranges from his tireless and enthusiastic support for the mission of encouraging the reading, writing, and enjoyment of poetry to his willingness to take on the tedious task of chairing the committee that revised the society's bylaws and constitution. He is also an accomplished musician who has performed at the annual Sam Ragan Poetry Festival.

Dave Manning is above all a wise poet of celebration whose poems are infused with "the fury of grace" to borrow a phrase from his 2006 Poet Laureate winning poem, "Requiem." So sample a few poems and celebrate! - Pat Riviere-Seel

Pat Riviere-Seel is president of the North Carolina Poetry Society. In addition to her admiration for Dave and his work, she shares his love of running and felines.

Requiem

The Authority of Dream said take
one final look, and so, awake,
I run with the fury of grace
down to the wind and water
where the meek green-headed ducks
sail off onto the far fog-shrouded lakes,
where the great blues stilt
in the ink-shadows of calligraphy.

And blown in the tempest of the dream,
I make final pilgrimage to the vast heronries
of heaven, their great nests clotted high
in the dead, swamp-drowned cypresses
of the estuaries, the waste-wets,
riverine salt-fields where the tears
of God fall into his old creation crumbling
like glacial till at the horizon
of the up-rolling world. I run west

away from the chaos of the world's
reworking into the wind-blown switchgrass,
into the milfoil fields, low sun in my eyes,
late day colors mixing with indigo
of the failing final night.

I pray for another ark to come
for this failed trial world, to salvage
all its intricate work of innocence --
the robed heron, the firegreen duck,
the waving grass, the proud dead tree,
all made to flee the rolling up
of day and night.

For no other world has taken us
like a mother into its meadows
where the sweet strong yeast of love
once dusted down on it until
the heavenly contagion took and spread,
and all things came awake and grew.

Buddhist Pigeon

Trails

They start where stairs lead
down to creeks, then wander
through willows in and out of sun.
They draw me with a feline curiosity
for passages of access or escape. I enter
and follow till light runs out.

At night I leave my body,
flow down lanes of shade and light,
discover side-trails I never saw before.
Later, I hunt these paths by day --
somewhere they must be real.

I don't think trails ever end,
only become brush-clogged and faint
before continuing. All trails finally connect,
which you will discover by patient parting
of the undergrowth.

There is mystery in turning corners
into fresh unknown -- leaf-light kaleidograms,
no two alike -- even danger --
the shadowed copperhead, the unexpected
daytime raccoon. And there is loss
when wheel tracks start in deep grass,
then die out (where hope died?)
at a crumpled shack with newspapered walls,
a soiled doll's dress by the door.

I've found scrub-hidden doors to trails
that switchback up through creekbeds,
break out into high loneliness
at piles of blackened rocks,
lightning-struck trailheads, the
landing-sites of ancient gods.

Witness and Serenade

David Treadway Manning, a California native, received his Ph.D. in chemistry from Caltech and now lives with his wife, Doris, in Cary. An encounter with Eliot's "Four Quartets," in a required literary course in graduate school, initiated his obsession with poetry. A career in industrial research began with a 37-year residence in West Virginia and continued in North Carolina, where he retired in 1988. In his new home he began actively writing and publishing poetry. After joining the North Carolina Poetry Society, he won the NCPS Poet Laureate Award in 1996, 1998, and 2006. He critiques poetry submitted by new members of the NCPS and serves on the board of the Poetry Council of North Carolina. He is host of the Friday Noon Poets of Chapel Hill, with whom he has read his work on WUNC-TV. A Pushcart nominee, David Manning has had poems published in Asheville Poetry Review, Chattahoochee Review, Christian Century, Free Lunch, Main Street Rag, Mankato Poetry Review, New Orleans Review, Pembroke Magazine, Potato Eyes, Rattle, Southern Poetry Review, and other journals. He has four chapbooks: Negotiating Physics and Other Poems (1999) and Poets Anonymous (2001), both by Old Mountain Press; Out After Dark(2003), by Pudding House, from which "Trails" and "Witness and Serenade" are drawn; The Ice-Carver, which won Longleaf Press's chapbook competition in 2004, and from which "Buddhist Pigeon" is drawn. The various themes of his poems include nature/the environment, science, spirituality, love, fantasy, and recollections of weird characters and school days. Dave is a lifelong choral and concert singer, a background which imparts a sense of music to his lines.