Welcome to National Poetry Month, 2015! We’re celebrating all month long. Each day we will bring you a poem we love–a selection from one of our published or forthcoming collections. In turn, the featured poets will introduce poems they love. Happy April!
Today’s featured poet is Abayomi Animashaun, author of the poetry collections The Giving of Pears and Sailing for Ithaca, and editor of the anthology Others Will Enter the Gates: Immigrant Poets on Poetry, Influences, and Writing in America.
Silence
When learning is surrendered
At your gates
And one stays for months
Years and days
You become the destination
And the halfway point.
The lamp
The over-grown path
The pond
And the clear night-sky.
You become the open field
The thick brush
The village
Where nothing lives
The wilderness
Where all is born.
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Abayomi has chosen to introduce “An Adventure” by Louise Gluck.
He says: I first came across Louise Gluck’s “An Adventure” (a poem from her new collection, Faithful and Virtuous Nights) on Poetry Daily, and I was immediately drawn to its expansive and limpid feel. I was also drawn to how early and how well the tone was established in the poem, not to mention Gluck’s masterful movement from one section to the next. For me, “An Adventure” is a poem of wisdom and depth, one that calls no attention to itself.
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Abayomi Animashaun is a Nigerian émigré whose poems have appeared in such journals as 5A.M., African American Review, Southern Indiana Review, Diode, The Adirondack Review, The Drunken Boat, and The Cortland Review. He is the author of The Giving of Pears, winner of the 2008 Hudson Prize, and Sailing for Ithaca. He teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
