Good News Department

It's always nice to receive good news. This past week has been sweetened by a plethora of good stuff. First, I learned that Blogalicious had been named to Our 50 Favorite Poetry Blogs. No prize or anything, but it's good to know that my blog has received some kudos.

Then along came two beautiful new reviews of my book, Temptation by Water. The first, by Susan Meyers, appears in Pirene's Fountain, one of my favorite online journals. Meyers begins the review with these words: 

Diane Lockward’s Temptation by Water is a deft balancing act between contraries: joy and loss, male and female, the lush and the sere, the buoyant and the fallen, the surface of things and the inner life. The tone of the poems achieves a range from deeply sad and moving to deliciously wicked and funny. Read the rest of the review HERE.

The other review is by Nic Sebastian at Very Like a Whale. I've mentioned Nic here before and praised her innovative work in bringing audio poems to the internet at her site Whale Sound. Several times a week Nic records a poem by another poet. These recordings are available at the site and at iTunes. For free! Nic has a wonderful reading voice, so it's really quite thrilling to have her read one of your poems. But she also is a great reader of poetry books and does the occasional review at Very Like a Whale. She begins her review with these words:

I’m someone who spends a fair amount of time reading poetry aloud and I know very well by now that there is poetry that leaps willingly into your voice, and other poetry that, well – has to be coaxed. And as I noted [elsewhere], writing well for voice has emotional and intellectual imperatives as well as the pure sound/voice imperative – it’s not just a matter of dutifully sounding things out as you write. Diane’s poems are definitely in the "leaping to voice" category. . . 

Read the rest of the review HERE. A unique feature of this review is that Nic includes audios of her reading two poems from my book—"Implosion" and "The Temptation of Mirage."

Then along came my contributor's copy of Poet Lore, a print journal I adore. And there's my poem, "Preservation." I'm halfway through this issue and find it to be one of the best issues this journal has put out. It's just loaded with poems that I'm marking to return to. There's also a wonderful essay about odes by Gray Jacobik. If you're not a subscriber, you should be.