Ellen Steinbaum and David Surette
Tuesday, March 24, 2009, at 7:30 p.m.
Ellen Steinbaum, a poet and journalist, has been a popular featured reader both nationally and throughout the Boston area. She writes a literary column for The Boston Globe and is also the author of a one-person play, CenterPiece, which she has performed. In her first book, Afterwords, she looked at loss, with poems about the illness and death of her husband. Her new book, Container Gardening speaks of what is perishable and what endures and what makes us who we are.
The poet Lloyd Schwartz says, " In Container Gardening the losses we suffer-private, public, political, natural-are universal. But she knows, with wry certainty, that "what is broken can / (never) / be repaired / the pieces can / (not) / be put back." Definitely one or the other. ...The contained garden of her poems becomes a conscious strategy to deal with all those-all our-losses.
The boat from Irian Jaya
never came. If it had
he would not have taken
the flight to
Kuching
where he met the man
who spoke to him of Langkawi
where he
saw the photograph
that drew him to Alor Setar
where he met the woman
who came home with him to Boston
where they bought the house
where
they raised the children
who would have been
different children
in a different house
if the boat from Irian Jaya
had arrived.
David Surette's new book of poetry is Easy to Keep, Hard to Keep In. Surette's poems have recently appeared in the anthologies French Connections: A Gathering of Franco-American Poets and Cadence of Hooves: A Celebration of Horses. He is a contributing editor at Salamander and taught poetry at this year's Cape Cod Writers' Conference. He co-hosts Poetribe, a poetry series in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts.