Pamela Alexander
Click on the "Archive" button above to return to the Features archives

Pamela Alexander is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Slow Fire (Ausable, 2007). Her other books are Inland (1997), which won an Iowa Poetry Prize; Commonwealth of Wings (Wesleyan, 1991); and Navigable Waterways (1984), which won a Yale Younger Poet award. Alexander has received two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Massachusetts, as well as fellowships from the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College and the Ohio Arts Council.

Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including American Alphabets, Best American Poetry 2000, The Extraordinary Tide, American Voices, Poetry for a Small Planet, and Cape Discovery, and in many periodicals, including the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Boston Book Review, Orion, TriQuarterly, Poetry, The Journal, New Republic, American Scholar.

Some of Alexander’s poems have been included in an audio-anthology on CD; others were set to music for a public performance, broadcast as part of a satellite radio program, and featured on the websites of National Public Radio and the American Academy of Poets.

She taught at M.I.T. for many years and is now on the writing faculty at Oberlin College.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WHAT WE NEED

A roof over
three squares.
Warmth to wear,
something to burn

in winter.  Water
music: sheets
of rain hung out
to dry.  Time, or

the habits of light.
A road that thins
among hills.  Hills.
Once an image

sufficed; now I see
we must speak.

PRACTICE

1

A large blue room, one leaf
on the bare floor.

Large blue leaf.

2

The leaf rises, finds
the place a tree once gave it.
Pins itself to air.

3

The stone is granite, composed
of several stones.

Its mica glitters, flakes of sun on water.
Quartz glows, blade of a knife
overboard.  Feldspar likes

the long nap of geologic afternoons.

4

The stone is composed.
It is the most private form of fire

and the size of a heart.

5

The cricket has practiced all morning.
It can’t be any more of a cricket.

It wants to be tall grass, too,
and a warm day, no birds.

6

The stone lifts itself
to the top of the mountain.
The spot it covered is still damp.
The sun beetles above it, large
blue light.

LOCAL NEWS

Grass points.  Sycamores elaborate, but why
should I listen?  Despite their advice I age faster.
Under their long appointments with themselves
I run errands.
                     Dirt composes
rumors I will lie down with it for a song.
I shut a big door against such bawdiness
then open it to drag the philodendrons outside,
their pots full of fibrous wreaths.  Let the sky
water them.  The driveway glistens
like crushed insects; ants tap their feelers
as if counting the fallen.  They’re easily distracted,
having only one mind to share among thousands
of feet. 
I heft my two boots over the threshold
and sit down like a city and have no peace:  I hear
the moon get up, a mockingbird practice
all night, trees expand into air and earth.

Back to the top of the page


  © 2008-2009 Greater Brockton Society for Poetry and the Arts, Inc.
           All Rights Reserved
     Sharpfocus Media Services     Website Design by Arnold Danielson