Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh, and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Today’s selection once again focuses on a poet I should have known about, but did not. Irish poet Voana Groarke was born in Mostrim (population 2,072) in the middle of the country. She received her degrees from Irish universities including Trinity College, Dublin, before coming to the U.S. to teach at Villanova and Wake Forest. She currently teaches at the University of Manchester in the UK. She has published six volumes of poetry, won several prizes and awards for her writing, and is also currently editor of the Poetry Ireland Review.

Today’s poem is simple, and yet not so simple. It’s a character study, perhaps in the vein of Longfellow’s famous blacksmith, about an Italian stone carver, who works on headstones for the local cemetery. It is a more thoughtful portrait however, far from one-dimensional, with an interplay of thought between the perfect figures he carves, intricate but lifeless, frozen in time, and life’s simple, but transient realities.

She begins with,

The day is hot. So far this morning

his hand has held true, not a stipple,

not a glitch unwarranted. Some days

his right hand contradicts what his left

(his holding, placid, steadfast left) requires.

He works in shade. A man of means has died

and the dying must be marked in marble

carved to trap not grief but its dramatized affect:

a mantilla so fine it weeps its lace; a boot so certain,

it folds the fact of death in every crease.

As he carves exactingly detailed portraits of others in stone, he thinks about his own family, and his own life. The observed details of life are simple, but very sensory in nature: The curl of his wife’s hair, the tilt of his daughter’s chin when singing, rabbit and peaches for dinner. His mind goes back and forth, methodically, between the two worlds he inhabits:

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