Keep and Give Away: Poems (South Carolina Poetry Book Prize)

Poems of discovery and loss pull the magical from the mundane Keep and Give Away was selected by Terrance Hayes as the inaugural winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize sponsored by the South Carolina Poetry Initiative. In her first full-length collection, Susan Meyers guides us through her examination of life's ordinary moments and the seemingly ordinary images that abide in them to reveal the extraordinary. From minutia to marriage, crumbs to crows, nothing is too commonplace to escape her attention as she traverses terrains of childhood, loss, relationships, and death. Mostly lyrical and often elegiac, the poems of Keep and Give Away move along the rifts between the past and present, the lived and desired. The dominant emotions of the verses are deepened by observations rooted in our natural world, where birds are "yeses quickening the air" and the sky can "lap you up, and up." In the book's final section, marriage poems turn to fishing and gardening for their truths, contemplations that recognize the realities of a world governed by luck, imperfection, contraries, and—most of all—love.

Poems of discovery and loss pull the magical from the mundane

Keep and Give Away was selected by Terrance Hayes as the inaugural winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize sponsored by the South Carolina Poetry Initiative.

In her first full-length collection, Susan Meyers guides us through her examination of life's ordinary moments and the seemingly ordinary images that abide in them to reveal the extraordinary. From minutia to marriage, crumbs to crows, nothing is too commonplace to escape her attention as she traverses terrains of childhood, loss, relationships, and death. Mostly lyrical and often elegiac, the poems of Keep and Give Away move along the rifts between the past and present, the lived and desired. The dominant emotions of the verses are deepened by observations rooted in our natural world, where birds are "yeses quickening the air" and the sky can "lap you up, and up." In the book's final section, marriage poems turn to fishing and gardening for their truths, contemplations that recognize the realities of a world governed by luck, imperfection, contraries, and—most of all—love.

Keep and Give Away was selected by Terrance Hayes as the inaugural winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize sponsored by the South Carolina Poetry Initiative. In her first full-length collection, Susan Meyers guides us through her examination of life's ordinary moments and the seemingly ordinary images that abide in them to reveal the extraordinary. From minutia to marriage, crumbs to crows, nothing is too commonplace to escape her attention as she traverses terrains of childhood, loss, relationships and death. Mostly lyrical and often elegiac, the poems of Keep and Give Away move along the rifts between the past and present, the lived and desired. The dominant emotions of the verses are deepened by observations rooted in our natural world, where birds are "yeses quickening the air" and the sky can "lap you up, and up." In the book's final section, marriage poems turn to fishing and gardening for their truths, contemplations that recognize the realities of a world governed by luck, imperfection, contraries and -- most of all -- love Contraries -- Your Mother Forbids You To Leave The Yard -- That Year -- Ghazal Of The Past -- Late One Friday Afternoon -- A Good Idea -- Primary Lessons -- Trying To Get It Right -- Sorry -- Her Best Note -- Cradle And All -- Washing The Breakfast Dishes, I Decide -- Villanelle For Gertrude Stein -- Alterations -- Mother, Washing Dishes -- October Song -- My Mother, Her Mornings -- Daughter -- An Early Spring Morning Of My Mother's Decline -- Selling My Mother's House -- Her Porch, Her Yard -- October, What The Mountains Say -- Still Water -- Something Green, For My Mother -- Weather -- Someone Near Is Dying -- Prayer -- Cavities -- Emergency Room -- Fifty-four Days -- Breath -- Sweetgum In January. Susan Meyers ; Foreword By Terrance Hayes. Published In Cooperation With The South Carolina Poetry Initiative, University Of South Carolina. You sit on the front steps in love with the little birds, the finches & sparrows fidgeting from leafy cover, not that they need you cheering them on to eat the seed at the feeders hung just for them sunflower, millet, a white sock of thistle; but when the hawk lowers its broad red shoulders and sits, alone, on the limb of the cherry tree, after the little birds, seeing it coming, have scattered like ifs and whens you pull for the hawk, admiring its heft, the turn of its head, not to mention the unblenched eyes, its black-banded tail. A work selected by Terrance Hayes as the inaugural winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize. In this collection, the author guides us through her examination of life's ordinary moments and the seemingly ordinary images that abide in them to reveal the extraordinary.