Happy Tuesday as I continue celebrating National Poetry Month by introducing several poets I know and whose work I admire. Today’s poets are two men I’ve also had as mentors at Table Rock Writers Workshop, and whom I now consider friends.

Denton Loving’s Feller is a tapestry of Appalachian beauty, scientific wonder, ecological insight, and personal vulnerability. His prologue of four poems about Bluebird and Red Fox are the warp strings for how the entire collection is woven, each poem deepening the more you read it. In Denton’s poems we see the mountain rivers with fish and hear the rituals for calling them; hear the chimney birds …and the growing force of their need…; upon hearing the whippoorwill ‘…nearly four decades gone from these wooded foothills …’  after pesticides and lack of beetles and moths, he wonders, ‘…What calls him back? What sustains/this small nightjar’s blind bravery?’

Loving writes of love, loss and past mistakes. In Albert Ulrey’s X-Ray Eyes (Albert Ulrey was the first person to describe the X-ray tetra) ‘…But I never learned how much voltage it would take//to forgive my own sins, to reveal through my armature/the ponderous beasts swimming in my chest.’ And there is hope and yearning in these poems. From Budburst, ‘… In my next life, I don’t want to/be the harvester or the harvest//I want to be the budburst/Those velvetlike lobes//so diaphanous and sensuous/in their terrific unwinding.

At the end of the book are notes explaining references within various poems, adding another shade and nuance to what has already been read.  

When I listen to Phillip read his work, there is musicality in his voice. When I read the poems in his new collection, Moonflower, I hear blues, soul, and jazz. A moonflower is a milky white blossom that opens only at night, like a tiny light shining in a garden, and dies in the morning. Its fragrance an intoxicating mix of jasmine and vanilla. The flower is the perfect symbol for this collection as it blooms and exposes light throughout. In Moonflower Daze, the poet riffs, ‘I’m not one to rejoice in the rain/On edge, night in my eyes, the growls/of bugs and motorcycles speed across the moon/jive in the sky like stars jive in the dust/… For the Moonflower, a poem of observation on hatred, Phillip ends the poem with this image of hope and beauty, ‘…I stretch my legs on the bedrock without fire/The moonflower spirals without smoke/up the trellis, heart-shaped foliage/unfolds her white windward sails/on the wide ship of night.

Shabazz combines his experiences of protest, racism, finding an absent father, and more with the voices of other powerful Black poets and writers. In Listening to Langston, he writes, ‘Today you will write about lights, he says/I have pencils, notebook paper, and a folder/I trail the fluorescent light on his little hand as he/lifts a marker to write poetry notes across the board/… (I remember Phillip writing ‘poetry notes’ in the same way in one of his classes at Table Rock.) He memorializes Tamir Rice in Of Cudell Park, and pays tribute to Benjamin Zephania in Invisible Flame. Paul Green and Aime Cesaire also have tributes.

Phillip’s poems are bold and daring, much like the moonflower that only blooms in the dark.

You can find Denton’s Feller at Mercer University Press

You can find Phillip’s Moonflower at Fernwood Press

And tomorrow you’ll find me right back at my window with two more poets, the moon being a theme in their work too. I hope you’ll join me.