Rust in August
1st Edition
Published on 5. January 2024
110 pages
979-8-9892186-2-2 (ISBN)
Description
Writer and journalist Greg Shaw brings us his first collection of poems just in time for his 60th birthday. Shaw's poetry is built on the memory of sadness and humor, despair and hope. Places-an airplane seat, an interstate highway, a cold urban street, an enveloping forest, a warm bed-stir the poetic senses. The trajectory of these places may begin with grief or awe, but the narrative progresses upward, toward humor and hope.
Nature and technology are often the inspiration. Shaw's influences can be found in fellow Oklahomans Ron Padgett and Joy Harjo and the poetry of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Billy Collins.
More details
Person
Following stints working in grocery stores and on petroleum tank farms, Greg Shaw worked as a newspaper reporter in his home state of Oklahoma before going on to government and corporate speechwriting. He's authored, co-authored, and ghostwritten several bestselling nonfiction books. He founded Clyde Hill Publishing, which focuses on innovation, and co-founded Pulley Press, a poetry imprint. This is his first collection of poetry.
Content
- Intro
- A Window Seat
- Center seat, this time
- Fern Lane
- Veterans Day
- Along the Charles
- Boylston
- Sandcastles on the Cape
- Blue Jello
- Baseball
- Sailboats
- Neighbors
- Thanksgiving
- Ode to Kehinde Wiley's "Rumors of War"
- Venice
- The Tulsa World
- Yoga in Cordoba
- Purple Robe
- February
- Sunrise
- The Brigadoon Apartments
- On doorbelling and democracy
- Junco
- Blink
- Ode to the Oud
- Fading
- A Star on Top
- Oscillations
- On the difference between sympathy and empathy
- Smoking a Pipe at Lake Alice in the Cascade Foothills
- The Red River Valley
- Chair
- Glaring at my chair
- The Snoqualmie
- Whitman lives
- Intermittent Rain
- Lanes of Destruction
- A Letter to Charlie Soap
- The Interstate
- Unconditional
- Grandaddy
- The Lodge at Lake Crescent in The Olympic Mountains
- On Mom's Sept 23rd Birthday
- Turning in
- Zenith
- The Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie
- Pastoral
- Another poem about birds (and trees)
- Street Scene
- Standing on a Bridge in Greenwich, Connecticut
- Saturday morning
- Leaf Blowers
- Arbor Day 1
- Arbor Day 2
- Christmas in Hawaii
- No fly-fishing
- Town and Country
- President Andrew Jackson, Sequoyah, Chief Justice Marshall, and Some Other Guys Get Into an Argument at the Smithsonian*
- What's wrong with me?
- The National Portrait Gallery, District of Columbia
- Ode to a Home One
- Ode to a Home Two
- Passing Through
- Cracks in the heavens
- Caress
- Paint Splatters
- Chicago, the fever dream
- Pool Spider
- The Enigma of Arrival
- The Samara of Mount Cuba
- Falling
- When looking out a window in the coffee shop
- Owners
- On a Sao Paolo Street
- Athenian Summer
- Athens Then and Now
- Return to Sender
- A streetcar named A.I.
- Carolina
- Ars Poetica
- About the Author
