So I got an email from an agent asking me to review this guy's book before Father's Day.
His mother poem (for all his talks on NPR) just doesn't compare with yours.
Had I not revisited yours this morning, I might have agreed to review his book.
This cycle of poems deals with “mommy issues” in, hopefully, all the right ways and for all the right reasons! The first of this three-poem cycle is below. Huge gratitude, once again, to The Good Men Project for publishing more of my work, and a big shout out to the fathers everywhere who kept it real for the kids. (Link to these two and all the previous poems here.)
Our Mothers, Whose Art is Heaven
If men ultimately succeed in burning this earth,
all our mothers will weep to drown the fire,
flooding every home and sidewalk and valley
with salted tears, turning a scorched landscape
into an ocean of accord, overwhelming the sea
itself, polluted to death with plastic and poison,
and all living creatures will learn to breathe
underwater, finally becoming formless beings
—a remedial evolution reversing eons wherein
this planet became a waystation for undeveloped
souls—as the sun implodes and the moon grows
numb in darkness, a silent peace holding sway
in the serenity of a deathless, maternal eternity.
Sean Murphy, author of six books, has been publishing fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays for over twenty years. He has appeared in NPR's "All Things Considered", USA Today, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and AdAge. A long-time columnist for PopMatters, his work has also appeared in Salon, The Village Voice, Washington City Paper, The Good Men Project, Memoir Magazine, and more. Sean is Founding Director of 1455, a non-profit that celebrates storytelling.
https://www.bullmurph.com/original-poem-our-mothers-whose-art-is-heaven/
I feel like he tried to write a poem that pc women would approve of. It's too bleak for my taste, and egocentric in some way that bothers me. When I look at the sources that published his work, I imagine he writes, in large part, to please a leftist mindset. This irks me. His poem is political, written from the outside in. It's not bad, just not honest.
Last line implies that deathlessness, where there is no life, is maternal. I don't dig that idea at all. Yet another leftie notion that demeans women.