Gotta be on my toes - and work up an appetite!

Tomorrow my virtual book tour 'Around the Edges of the World' kicks off in Ireland, on Barbara's Bleeuugh!, the blog of poet Barbara Smith. Barbara's blog is a great homey place, where you can settle down all unawares and next thing you know you're engaged in the deepest, most probing thoughts! And you know what, she is going to be softening me up with a Roman banquet...!

Barbara's own poetry is like this: it has such an easy clear surface, with a vividness of often domestic detail, and yet touches on the widest and most profound issues, reaching simultaneously back into the past and forward into the future. Here's the ending to the (not so domestic) 'Trench Monument' from her collection, Kairos, from Doghouse Books:

But now, in spring, white maggots blindly creep

From thawing flesh remnants,writhing, vying
for their own stale warmth, feeding the biomass,

reducing the remains to a future fossil.
Particles of dust, carbon atoms:

emissions in a shell-shocked future.