Voigt - Messenger: new and selected poems, 1976-2006

The Feeder was reprinted in The Pushcart Prize (vol. xxx) and Harvesting the Cows in The Best American Poetry 2005 . Thanks to these editors. Thanks to the Rockefeller Foundation for a months stay at Bellagio; to the Academy of American Poets for its James Merrill Fellowship; and, at W. W. Norton, to Amy Cherry, David Stanford Burr, and Carol Houck Smith, who has brought so much poetry to the world.

I want also to acknowledge poets whose work prompted or enabled some of these poems. In earlier books, Stephen Dobyns (the narratives in The Lotus Flowers ), William Meredith (Effort at Speech), Allen Grossman (Song and Story), and Agha Shahid Ali (Himalaya). In this one, Reg Gibbons and Michael Ryan (Rubato), Carl Phillips (Redbud), and Michael Collier (The Feeder). Finally, my deep gratitude for the acute, candid, instructive responses I have received from generous readers over the years, too many to be listed here; from my canny newest reader, James Longenbach; from my first reader, my touchstone, Louise Glck.

Deposed, abstracted, the head lay on the ground like a coin. But the rest, released into the yard, language and direction wrung from it, flapped the insufficient wings and staggered forward, convulsed, instinctive I thought it was sobbing to see it hump the dust, pulsing out those muddy juices, as if something, deep in the gizzard, in the sack of soft nuggets, drove it toward the amputated member. Even then, watching it litter the ground with snowy refusals, I knew it was this that held life, gave life, and not the head with its hard contemplative eye.

We could say that snow fills the crotches of the birch and makes a webbed hand. We could say, Look at the graceful line of falling snow! The point is: It falls and falls on trees and houses, with or without comment. 2nd Voice ITEM: Should we record snow falling on the tamaracks beside the black Winooski River, and not the trapper crouched on the far bank, who thinks: Such silence, such order. ITEM: Seven stones in a circle make eight shapes. ITEM: Not being birds, we seek our own windpatterns, fashion the lute, discover language.