Laurie Sheck

Laurie Sheck Poems

Laurie Sheck Biography

On July 10, 1953, Laurie Sheck was born in the Bronx, New York. She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Captivity (Knopf, 2007), which interacts, in part, with the journals of Gerard Manley Hopkins; Black Series (2001); The Willow Grove (1996), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Io at Night (1990); and Amaranth (1981). Her poems have been included in two volumes of Best American Poetry and three volumes of The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.)

The Best Poem Of Laurie Sheck

And Water Lies Plainly

Then I came to an edge of very calm
But couldn't stay there. It was the washed greenblue mapmakers use to indicate
Inlets and coves, softbroken contours where the land leaves off
And water lies plainly, as if lamped by its own justice. I hardly know how to say how it was
Though it spoke to me most kindly,
Unlike a hard afterwards or the motions of forestalling.

Now in evening light the far-off ridge carries marks of burning.
The hills turn thundercolored, and my thoughts move toward them, rough skins
Without their bodies. What is the part of us that feels it isn't named, that doesn't know
How to respond to any name? That scarcely or not at all can lift its head
Into the blue and so unfold there?

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