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Missing the Owl poems by Richard Widerkehr
Richard Widerkehr’s fifth poetry collection, Missing The Owl, uses different voices and personas to reflect on the past, present, and future, and one's reckoning with uncertainty, pain, loss, and death. But Widerkehr lands squarely upon the truth and beauty of accepting nature and its relative disquietude. “Take your time with these engaging poems, you’ll want to savor them mouthful by delicious mouthful.” (Jenifer Browne Lawrence) POETRY / General ISBN: 978-1-962082-45-7 (print; softcover; perfect bound) 84 pages |
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Missing The Owl is Richard Widerkehr’s fifth book of poems. His previous books are Night Journey (Shanti Arts Publishing), At the Grace Cafe (Main Street Rag), In the Presence of Absence (MoonPath Press), The Way Home (Plain View Press). He has also authored three chapbooks and a novel, Sedimental Journey (Tarragon Books). His poems and stories have appeared in over one hundred publications, including Rattle, Atlanta Review, Crab Creek Review, I-70 Review, and Verse Daily. One of his poems was broadcast by Garrison Keillor on Writer’s Almanac. Widerkehr won two Hopwood first prizes for poetry at the University of Michigan, first prize for a short story at the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference, three awards in The Bridge’s poetry contests, and three Sue C. Boynton Contest prizes. He worked as a teacher in the Upward Bound Program at Western Washington University and as a counselor on the mental heath unit of a hospital. |
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“‘Beauty takes a beating in the streets, and truth tries to do too much.’ In Richard Widerkehr’s fifth poetry collection, truth and beauty are restless companions. Exploring topics of racial injustice and climate-change driven wildfires ‘as if he must appease the gods of flame,’ Widerkehr draws the reader into a delicately wrought macrocosm. The poems move from interactions with the natural world to the confines of a behavioral health unit. In one moment, the speaker lifts a maple leaf, to ‘crush its pale, scarlet tent to my lip.’ He tells us that ‘One of These Days / The trees are going to walk out of their world into ours,’ before moving on to ‘stone rooms’ where patients are likened to spirits and stone statues that ‘Nobody sees . . . in the daytime.’ These poems create their own tactile world, where desire is ‘a latticework of thatch and wood,’ or a sea creature that wants another ‘with no religion, lips with many mouths.’ Take your time with these engaging poems, you’ll want to savor them mouthful by delicious mouthful.” “Missing the Owl is a record not only of keenly felt experiences, but of the very act of trying to remember. Again and again, Richard Widerkehr forgoes the grandiose mythologizing of his own life in favor of an honest, self-interrogative process of finding the limits of how much he can recall, how much he really saw. He asks, ‘Can you remember the white / edges of rooftops, how the forest rose to meet you?’ What he finds in answer is a gift to us all: an understanding of how to be more present with what we love, more attentive, here and now.” “Good poets will bare their souls. Better poets will also bare yours. Reading Richard Widerkehr’s Missing The Owl, you will examine your own ‘smoke in smoke, / fire in fire,’ your personal ‘unwept salt’ and ‘mercy slow as any stone.’” “Richard Widerkehr’s Missing The Owl uses different voices and personas to reflect on the past, the present, and contemplate the future, often holding images up to nature’s light, ‘trees which give us everything’. Some voices express uncertainty. One ‘likes to stand on doorsills, thresholds’; another, far more confident, reports, ‘I can launch ninety missiles from my blondie dreadlocks, i know i got delusions’. This framework of conversation tosses back and forth images of pain and struggle, of death and loss, ‘the fireweed has gone white’, as well as revealing many voices of love, beauty, and acceptance of human nature within the natural world, ‘grateful for green mazes, fate and happenstance’. There is yearning heard in these voices, as in any life, some things, like Richard’s great horned owl, may still be missed.” |
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