In my little life / I hope to hold / some wonder
Poetry | Kevin Spenst | Issue 44
Some Force at the Centre of Our Silence
In my little life
I hope to hold
some wonder —
like so many
bevelled stones
that I pile up
to mark a place
to return to
that you find
& add to.
As our aspirational
spirits crash,
the ... let’s call it
spindrift
moistens
the moss
which has grown
in the elapsed
centuries between
the oceans
and stones.
This builds our solid
green
dreamlife,
grounding us
helpmates.
A Prayer to the Dissenter
“The anus of an angel is a star”
scrawled young William Blake on
the Covent Garden
jakes of a stipple engraver whose face wore
the look of a man about to be hanged,
all of which Blake told
his father after their enquiry
into an apprenticeship that was not to be.
Long after Blake took his beatings,
the stipple engraver rose
to fame as the last to die from the Tyburn hanging tree.
At the age of ten,
as far as ever Blake could saunter outside London,
he looked up into the darksome air
into tree boughs swaying under cherubic wings
his home report
bringing him close to another purpling.
Did those blows
glitter out in pain sidereal,
a private aurora?
Young Blake,
old Blake, dead Blake; however you transpire
from room to room
shuffling out the creaks from old pains,
gift us again
through your visions,
rushlit and ribald,
eyes ever upon us,
the gumption to tear the world a new one.
Kevin Spenst has authored sixteen chapbooks plus an upcoming one with Anstruther Press, and four full-length books of poetry including the latest, A Bouquet Brought Back from Space (Anvil Press). He’s an organizer for the Dead Poets Reading Series, writes for subTerrain magazine, occasionally co-hosts Wax Poetic on Vancouver Co-op Radio, and teaches poetry at SFU’s The Writer’s Studio in Vancouver on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territory.
“Some Force at the Centre of Our Silence” and “A Prayer to the Dissenter” from A Bouquet Brought Back from Space (Anvil Press, 2024). Published with permission of Anvil Press. Copyright © 2025 Kevin Spenst
A Bouquet Brought Back from Space by Kevin Spenst Anvil Press, 2024
In a secularized society, what kind of faith in our collective powers and imaginations can be patch-worked together, and what might be the role of angels? Through multiple locales, languages, and spiritualities, A Bouquet Brought Back from Space both subverts and sublimates traditions of religious poetry, love poetry, and song.
Playful in form and formed full of play, this fourth book of poetry by Kevin Spenst explores loss, love and faith through the palindrome, Madlib, Fibonacci, found poem, prose poem, sonnet and various strains of free verse. Spenst meditates on mental health, poetic friendships and influences, and the possibility of there being an angel assigned to the Mennonites at the beginning of their global journey.
These poems sing, cry, and soothe.
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