Ann Townsend

Ann Townsend Poems

Ann Townsend Biography

Ann Townsend was born in Pittsburgh, raised in Pennsylvania and New Orleans, and earned her BA from Denison University and her MA and PhD in English literature from The Ohio State University. Townsend’s work fuses pastoral, domestic, and metaphysical concerns in verse that is often described as formally subtle and acute. She has cited Andrew Marvell, James Thomson, and John Clare as major influences. Townsend’s collections of poetry include Dime Store Erotics (1998) and The Coronary Garden (2005). With her husband, the writer and scholar David Baker, she edited Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry (2007) and released the chapbook Holding Katherine (1996). She has written two additional chapbooks, Modern Love (1995) and The Braille Woods (1997).)

The Best Poem Of Ann Townsend

In The Limbo Of Lost Words

After our love, I lie in the shadow of your shoulder
and drift to the sound of the seventeen-year locusts outside,
their lonely tenor buzz that rises and falls together
and as suddenly stops, and flares out again.

Their rhythm sweeps against the sides of the house,
rustles like late leaves, a soft desperate rasping,
the ave, ave, ave syllables of air, skin against skin.
When we came upon her yesterday, inside the chapel shadows,

the young soloist abandoned herself to the words she sang,
her translation like an absence of language. Her music
cast itself away and away, pulsing on, until the silence
of an empty room took its place, where the heat of day

is only lamplight through the stained windows.
It filters across the dusty floor. It lights
upon a pale blue wall, indiscriminate in what it touches.
And the mocking, mating voices of the locusts return again

in their regular pilgrimage out of the earth,
out of the dark, into the shadows.

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