A Portfolio of Poems from After Earth, and: Cosmography

Winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry

Michael Lavers received the 2018 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry for After Earth, which is forthcoming in 2019 from the University of Tampa Press. Pre-publication comments are glowing. Sidney Wade writes, "After Earth is engrossing, delicious, fulfilling, delightful, learned, surprising, riveting, powerfully broad, movingly deep, and beautiful." Lance Larsen praises its creation of "lyrical worlds both wild and domestic, with one foot in the tradition reaching back through the Romantics to the Ancients, and the other in the hurly-burly of right now." Jacqueline Osherow says, "These beautiful meditations, by turns celebratory, funny, mournful and elegiac, make an exquisite, lyric truce with the human predicament." We are pleased to include a selection of poems as a small preview of After Earth.

Cosmography

In one, a cesspool stirred to lamentation.In one, a vacant palace and a thronedeposed by air that would step downif it could be mere breath again. In one,all hours coalesce, like insects hatchingon a standing pond, while in another,they make a single-file break for itover the barbed-wired hills. No stars in one,or else no moon, or else no sun, or elsetwo suns, stabbing their spurs into the earth.Some just like ours, except for wind, and rain,and some where starlight drips like resinfrom cracked wood, and gravity relaxesits long tenure on the leaves, and someonemakes a greenish fire for us from the firs.The one where silver moths will cover youlike cloth until your shivering has stopped,then fly, blushing, away. The ones whereI can find you, and the ones where I runthrough the dunes, calling your name, hearingthe darkness take it, and the boiling sea.One with a fountain. One with a cloud.