Staff Pick of the Week

Crazy Quilt

If I had my way,
we'd all sleep together in a
rickety, four-poster bed:
eight beagles, two tabbies, grandma,
three tots,
my old man, and the hen.
We'd squirm, squeak, and giggle--
snores and sighs rising like ballons

under a silvery roof of tin
under a tent of silvery rain
under a silver-dollar moon--

we'd snuggle
safe as spoons
and dream together

while the clock
chomps the night
like a bone.

-E.D. Pendarvis

This week's Staff Pick is in honor of National Poetry Month. Wild Sweet Notes: Fifty Years of West Virginia Poetry 1950-1999 edited by Barbara Smith and Kirk Judd. This title, and other collections of poetry by West Virginians, can be found in the West Virginia Collection of the West Virginia Library Commission Reference Library.

"With insights into Japanese flower gardening and hog butchering, into mother-daughter relations and horse trading, in verse that is wistful or bright or drenched in rural beauty, Wild Sweet Notes: Fifty Years of West Virginia Poetry surprises and delights... This varied collection of remarkably high poetic quality will enchant readers throughout the English-speaking world.

The editors, longtime aficionados of their state's poetic production and well-established poets in their own right, professed themselves gratified and inspired by the quality they found in an outpouring of submissions. More than one hundred ten living West Virginia poets and some twenty deceased poets are represented here.

This book will appeal to readers young and old, to students and gardeners, to political activists, to anyone who responds to natural beauty and to truth. West Virginia Poet Laureate Irene McKinney has said that poetry is the one form of art which can't 'sell out.' This book doesn't either." (Text from title's book jacket)