[New-Poetry] Today's news

[David Graham]

I've been reading with much pleasure David Tucker's first collection,  
*Late for Work*, selected & introduced by Philip Levine for the  
Breadloaf Bakeless Prize.  Tucker is a new name to me, but he's not a  
new writer.  He's a fifty-something journalist and editor (New  
Jersey's Star-Ledger), and often writes about the newsroom  
experience.  Not a surprise that Levine would take to him, since he  
writes so well about the working world.



Today’s News

A slow news day, but I did like the obit about the butcher
who kept the same store for 50 years. People remembered
when his street was sweetly roaring, aproned
with flower stalls and fish stands.
The stock market wandered, spooked by presidential winks,
by micro-winds and the shadows of earnings. News was stationed
around the horizon, ready as summer clouds to thunder--
but it moved off and we covered the committee meeting
at the back of the state house, sat around on our desks
then went home early. The birds were still singing,
the sun just going down. Working these long hours
you forget how beautiful the early evening can be,
the big houses like ships turning into the night,
their rooms piled high with silence.

—by David Tucker.  Late for Work.  Houghton Mifflin, 2006.


==========================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
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