In this Book
- Keep and Give Away: Poems
- Book
- 2012
- Published by: University of South Carolina Press
- Series: South Carolina Poetry Book Prize
Poems of discovery and loss pull the magical from the mundane
Keep and Give Away was selected by Terrance Hayes as the inaugural winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize sponsored by the South Carolina Poetry Initiative.
In her first full-length collection, Susan Meyers guides us through her examination of life's ordinary moments and the seemingly ordinary images that abide in them to reveal the extraordinary. From minutia to marriage, crumbs to crows, nothing is too commonplace to escape her attention as she traverses terrains of childhood, loss, relationships, and death. Mostly lyrical and often elegiac, the poems of Keep and Give Away move along the rifts between the past and present, the lived and desired. The dominant emotions of the verses are deepened by observations rooted in our natural world, where birds are "yeses quickening the air" and the sky can "lap you up, and up." In the book's final section, marriage poems turn to fishing and gardening for their truths, contemplations that recognize the realities of a world governed by luck, imperfection, contraries, and—most of all—love.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- pp. xv-xvi
- Trying to Get It Right
- Contraries
- pp. 3-20
- Ghazal of the Past
- pp. 8-25
- Late One Friday Afternoon
- pp. 9-10
- A Good Idea
- pp. 11-12
- Primary Lessons
- pp. 13-30
- Trying to Get It Right
- pp. 14-31
- Her Best Note
- pp. 17-34
- Cradle and All
- pp. 18-35
- Villanelle for Gertrude Stein
- pp. 20-37
- Alterations
- pp. 21-38
- Mother, Washing Dishes
- pp. 22-39
- October Song
- pp. 23-40
- My Mother, Her Mornings
- pp. 24-26
- Need Has Nothing to Do with It
- Selling My Mother’s House
- pp. 32-33
- Her Porch, Her Yard
- pp. 34-51
- October, What the Mountains Say
- pp. 35-52
- Still Water
- pp. 36-53
- Something Green, for My Mother
- pp. 37-54
- Someone Near Is Dying
- pp. 40-41
- Emergency Room
- pp. 45-62
- Fifty-four Days
- pp. 46-47
- Sweetgum in January
- pp. 50-51
- What the Season Has Come To
- pp. 52-69
- Hat of Many Goldfinches
- pp. 53-54
- Small Bones of Contention
- A Counting
- pp. 57-74
- Morning Song
- pp. 58-75
- The One Place
- pp. 60-61
- Key West Elegy
- pp. 64-81
- Shelling: Ars Poetica
- pp. 65-66
- Fisher’s Luck
- pp. 67-84
- Fishing the Edisto
- pp. 68-70
- Out in the Cold with the Crows
- pp. 74-75
- Counting on the Slightest Chance
- pp. 76-93
- Small Bones of Contention
- pp. 77-94
- How the Living Worry
- pp. 78-95
- Our Manifold Sins
- pp. 79-80
- Love Poem Gone Astray
- pp. 81-82
- Planting, the Second Year
- pp. 83-84
- The Wheelbarrower
- pp. 85-102
- Neither the Season, Nor the Place
- pp. 86-103
- Keep and Give Away
- pp. 87-88