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Open Books: Events
May 28, 2009 07:30 PM
PETER LUDWIN & MICHAEL SPENCE
Peter Ludwin’s first full-length book, A Guest in All Your Houses ($13.95 Word Walker), is a love song for the people and land of the Southwest and Mexico. The landscape’s harshness (“I must gather enough of me up / to make it through winter”) and beauty (“a light that changed my life, / the desert beyond melting from bleached / to butter gold, lavender to mauve”) take on spiritual elements. His poems make clear his regard for and interest in the breadth of the area’s populace, from bikers to artists to the indigenous people, whose sometimes curtness he sees as “the roll call of massacres.”
Michael Spence’s Crush Depth ($15.95 Truman State) is a collection of skillfully realized and emotionally open poems concerning father-son and man-among-men relationships. Both Spence and his father served in the Navy, and he tells their stories of the complexities of military life in peacetime as well as in wartime with an eye for detail and an ear tuned to rhyme and rhythm. “His hitch / is ending, I object. Stokes gets the brig, / the captain grins… or he re-ups.” The metaphoric value of literal ships is put to fine use in these poems -- “Many things can show you how thin / your hull always was.”
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