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Potato Soup
Winner of the Nebraska Book Award in Poetry for 2004, Potato Soup "is rich with climate, place, color, detail and life, capturing within the covers of a single engaging and lovely collection so much of our part of the planet."—Ted Kooser
- GenresPoetry
92 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 1, 2021
Just Before Dawn
Just before dawn the great blue heron
glides its bony frame into the dusty light,
flapping slow above the russet field,
giant harvester inching through the rows,
its operator my father, perhaps,
pulling an ancient combine
behind an even older John Deere,
thin brown arms propped over its wheel,
his lungs wheezing, wiping his nose
with a rolled-up sleeve.
I can see his seedcap and work denims,
this scene replayed slowly ten thousand times,
following him after dark into the kitchen,
milking and feeding and fixing complete,
at the sink stripped to his boxers and undershirt,
washing with Lava the day’s grit off
his leathery face and arms,
aroma of supper and sweat and soap,
his old-fashioned wire-rims and old country
references, hold-over from the last century,
not embarrassing me now—
flying above it all,
settling down onto shallow water,
body erect, senses alert, all alone.
Just before dawn the great blue heron
glides its bony frame into the dusty light,
flapping slow above the russet field,
giant harvester inching through the rows,
its operator my father, perhaps,
pulling an ancient combine
behind an even older John Deere,
thin brown arms propped over its wheel,
his lungs wheezing, wiping his nose
with a rolled-up sleeve.
I can see his seedcap and work denims,
this scene replayed slowly ten thousand times,
following him after dark into the kitchen,
milking and feeding and fixing complete,
at the sink stripped to his boxers and undershirt,
washing with Lava the day’s grit off
his leathery face and arms,
aroma of supper and sweat and soap,
his old-fashioned wire-rims and old country
references, hold-over from the last century,
not embarrassing me now—
flying above it all,
settling down onto shallow water,
body erect, senses alert, all alone.
February 1, 2017
I really enjoyed this book. It reminds me of my own memories; visiting my grandparents. Driving to visit them, walking about on the farm, watching my grandparents work their land.
"Things, the biologist reminds us,
are becoming something else. Before my eyes
transformation of sugar into energy-tree, shrub, vine,
sunlight, and oxygen-this feeder hanging from a maple
imitating the deep throat of a flower"('Early September', 5)
"Oh, my child, how you dreamed!
And now this cackling confusion of starlings overhead,
the sun at a sharper angle, rousing the earth"('Late Winter: Survival', 18).
"And yet:
grandmother, father, me, son, granddaughter-stories I'm writing
in blood, passing down, layer into layer, better than skin-deep"('Palimpsest' 27).
Poems enjoyed for review later:
'Bones, ETC.'
'Sumac Scattering Like Bones'
'Toward Moonset'
'Saving Room'
"Things, the biologist reminds us,
are becoming something else. Before my eyes
transformation of sugar into energy-tree, shrub, vine,
sunlight, and oxygen-this feeder hanging from a maple
imitating the deep throat of a flower"('Early September', 5)
"Oh, my child, how you dreamed!
And now this cackling confusion of starlings overhead,
the sun at a sharper angle, rousing the earth"('Late Winter: Survival', 18).
"And yet:
grandmother, father, me, son, granddaughter-stories I'm writing
in blood, passing down, layer into layer, better than skin-deep"('Palimpsest' 27).
Poems enjoyed for review later:
'Bones, ETC.'
'Sumac Scattering Like Bones'
'Toward Moonset'
'Saving Room'
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews