His Only Merit by Benjamin Green

$17.99

Paper

979-8-89990-190-4

2025

When I finished compiling poems for my collection entitled Old Man Looking through a Window at Night, I thought I was done writing poetry. After all, it had taken twenty-six years to collect enough work for another full-length collection. I was sixty-six years old; there did not seem time enough to gather poems for another book. I read The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, the 1954 Knopf edition. Immediately, I started writing responses to his work. Some of the reactions became “after” poems; some of the writing sounded like a reply. I conversed with Stevens’ poetry, I conversed with Stevens, the man. Sometimes we argued; sometimes we agreed. Within a month, I had nineteen poems—this chapbook. The nineteen poems allowed me to acknowledge Stevens’ influence as a modern poet using my setting—a high desert canyon in New Mexico. The language is mine; the vocabulary is mine (even if Stevens’ work prodded me toward intellectual abstraction). Reading Stevens produced nineteen poems, definitely un-modern, the true work of a spiritual introvert living under a ribbon of sky between steep walls of rock.

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Benjamin Green is the author of eleven books including The Sound of Fish Dreaming (Bellowing Ark Press, 1996) and the upcoming Old Man Looking through a Window at Night (Main Street Rag). At the age of sixty-eight, he hopes his new work articulates a mature vision of the world and does so with some integrity. He resides in Jemez Springs, New Mexico.

PRAISE:

“Green’s take on the Wallace Stevens’ poems certainly gives them the New Mexico touch with corn in his beard, invitations to dance– such a beautiful sharing, and reminding, of lovely experience.”

–Shirley Balance Blackwell, author of ALREADY THERE and DITCHBANK DIARIES

“A great experiment to dialog with Stevens, and invite the conversation into Green’s landscape: quiet images in nature, nature within self and within all, beauty of transience and hope.”

–Susan Entsminger, editor of PINYON REVIEW

“In this taut, earthy verse, Green sees into elemental things not beyond them, inviting us to do the same. Creek, cottonwoods, canyon wall –– the natural world becomes vibrant in these images as the author finds value and meaning in them. His Only Merit is both exquisite and edifying, calling upon flux and stillness, as well as shadows and light, to evoke a sense of presence that overrides all thought, belief and doubt. A magnificent read.“

–Walt McLaughlin, writer, naturalist and publisher of WOOD THRUSH BOOKS

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