Poetry
Susan Tepper’s
New Poetry Release
”Confess”
In the poems comprising her newest collection, Susan Tepper is elegiac and lyrical (…a lake I carry on my back/one of stillness), often contemplating winter and its darkness with the necessary intervention of birds, foods, and the mysteries of human relationships—your arms hold secrets. And now and then a tough humor shines a light as well (Bury me in a giant keg—I’m lonely.) One feels her physical and inner landscape acutely, and one has to confess that heres’s a poet who really knows, to the bone, how breathing in the stories is done to the benefit of us all.
—Tim Suermondt, author of Josephine Baker Swimming Pool
There is an extreme sense of intimacy in the poems of Susan Tepper. You can literally feel on the scrim of your skin her engagements with her senses—the natural order of things. She is no ham-fisted poet, but brings a subtle, dark beauty, like a trail of deep blue. She is in constant conversation with the world, and only a poet who is deeply in tune to herself, and the signs the universe sends us, can bring this accomplished work to the plate. —Doug Holder/Ibbetson Street Press/Lecturer in Creative Writing, Endicott College
Susan Tepper’s book of poetry, CONFESS, is a handful of pearls in a hand extended as a gift bearing opalescent light, specks of muted colors, sometimes questioning who we are in shaping our destiny, and what escapes from our dark corners, as in her poem “Course”:…the heart meets itself, blankly, hears its name in the crumpled page… in “Egg” a beam creaks, mindful in the quiet of the passage of time. There still exists in “Part & Parcel” Two suitcases, side by side/have yet to be unpacked, and in “Each Sky” Tepper plucks from the ever changing sky her keen perception of what is a visual poem. —Judith Lawrence, Lilly Press. editor/publisher
Violetta by Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick
The Galway Review has put my poem "The Book Of Life" to music, re-titled: DO NO EVIL. https://www.mureka.ai/song-detail/136651464638465
THE BOOK OF LIFE
by Susan Isla Tepper
We crossed at the finish line
invisible to all but those
running for their lives
The various scenarios
we wrote before coming here
to live them out
Before the wars and
dubious treatises,
the body wars
claiming parts of us,
for some the whole package
There was never a division
of labor, my intentions
upon entering were clear:
Do No Evil.
So I got lost in the scramble
trying to find my way
over much heavy darkness.
So I made many mistakes.
Once again, The Galway Review has taken a poem of mine and put it to music. This sultry, jazzy rendition of my words is lovely.
Hoping you will have a listen ~ https://www.mureka.ai/song-detail/137709591068673
ENDLESS
The wet dawn
a struggle to make the hill
from weeks of walking
His lather—
crusted-over eyes
the short sleeps only
to force up, continue on.
All here was vast,
Endless—
as he recalled.
Puffing to reach the top
of the rise
he spotted the stone house
still a fair distance
the chimney smoke barely visible
A good sign, that smoke;
all in all a good sign.
This early hour
she’d be inside
dampening her hair
from the basin
knotting it tight at the neck.
How to explain the long absence;
months trickling to years.
Surely by now a new man
in charge— of her and the premises.
Squatting, he watched.
When at last the door opened
she came out alone to pitch the hay
lithe, still, under a dress
she swung that fork mightily.
This stirred him—
knees folding into high grass
contemplating what
brought a return to these parts.
Unable to answer,
if only to himself.
Some time close to noon
turning once to gaze back,
the clouds thinning out, stretching
smeared the painted sky.
APRIL IS POETRY MONTH IN LIMERICK, IRELAND
"Course" was posted on the outside of GOLDEN GRILL Restaurant, 8 William Street, Limerick, Ireland
