Speaking of poems

Award-winning local poet Barbara Crow said of a great poem, "It speaks to me."

At yesterday's session of Literary Lunches, Crow spoke, through poetry, of the death of her son, one of the main themes of her collection Coming up for Light and Air, a Minnesota Voices Project winner. Among the poems she read from the collection was "The Race," her imagining of taking her son's body from the funeral home out into the world where he comes to life again.

Crow read poems from others, including poems from Joseph Shroud's Below Cold Mountain. Here is one of those poems:

The First Law of Thermodynamics.


He was a good ole boy, and when he died his friends carried out
his final wish–the body was cremated and the ashes stuffed into shotgun shells. They walked through the woods he loved and fired aimlessly into the trees–he came down everywhere in a powdery rain, a pollen of ashes that once was the memory of a boy walking under trees showering him with leaves.

Crow also read work by Philip Booth and recommends poets Tess Gallagher, Ted Koozer and Jane Kenyon. In addition to being a poet and writer, Crow, a native of New Zealand, is a commentator for Prairie Public Radio.