Flying Beneath the Dog Star: Poems from a Pandemic by Kathryn Winograd

$14.99

 

I wrote Flying Beneath the Dog Star in the first spring of our pandemic during National Poetry Month, using many of the poetry prompts offered by NaPoWriMo (napowrimo.net).  These poems, written on the front porch of my cabin, are my journey through this strange and unknown world we are still living in.  Who knew when I sought solace at 9600 ft amidst the birds in my little spot above the Arkansas Valley, grieving over the deaths of eighteen hundred, that now we would have buried over a half million in this country alone, including my mother, my aunt, and my uncle?  The poems in Flying Beneath the Dog Star  were written in honor of my sister and my search for some kind of faith in a shaken world where the only “knowns” were a cabin porch, morning sun, and the nuthatch at the feeder.

 

*****
To The Three Ducks Flying Beneath the Dog Star 

 

So little you know, wild-winged

and unshaken beneath a dog star,

half-grazing the pines, the bare winter

aspen I stand in the dark wash of

waiting for the tip of a yellow moon.

In Ohio, girlhood, these April stars

circled a pond bull-dozed

by my father, a raft of cattail

where the red-wings spun their nests

above the scrim of caught water.

Tonight, in this near dark, so close

my hand could circle it,

Sirius hovers above the red

factory lights of Pueblo

and the Sangre de Cristo blue-

washed in this hour.

I am cold in this wind,

in this spine of the Milky Way,

these blue white stars named

for a bear or a lyre or a woman

weeping her dead into a river.

I think I was still half-sleeping

in a field of grass, in a haze

of stars, in a far and nameless

country you care nothing

about, burying and unburying

those I love. Such quiet,

the mining trucks to the north

stalled and the little generator

of a shed where no one lives

in winter shut down.

And then, your wings,

almost, against the moon.

Why must I always be alone,

searching for something beautiful?

*****

 

“Kathryn Winograd’s new chapbook, Flying Beneath the Dog Star, though rooted in an intense pandemic year, offers lyrical and exquisitely descriptive poems that speak to all of us. These quiet but not silent poems are alive with birds, one thread woven into a vivid tapestry of fibers: with griefs, rhythms of nature, the poet’s ponderings. Within and throughout these poems, the poet holds the reader tenderly in the pulsing center of here.”
–Veronica Patterson, author of Sudden White Fan, Loveland Poet Laureate, 2019-2022

 

“Written from the deep isolation of our 2020 – 2021 Pandemic and the vivid clarity of sky and land at her high altitude cabin, these elegiac poems count the losses, personal and global, while seeking what remains: the poet’s love for each bird and every star, for memory and hope. By facing a winter’s bounty of grief, Winograd also shows us that the seasons abide.”
–Carol D. Guerrero-Murphy, WILLA award winning author of Table Walking at Nighthawk, Chained Dog Dreams, and Bright Path Dark River.

 

“During times lived with few people (husband, family, friends) to a time thinking, at a distance, of all people (pan demos), Kathryn Winograd’s poems continue to harvest what is beautiful and powerful and true.”
–Martin McGovern, author of the poetry collection, Bad Fame, and, the play, Joseph K.

 

 

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Description

Flying Beneath the Dog Star: Poems from a Pandemic

by Kathryn Winograd

$14.99, paper

978-1-64662-734-9

2022

A longtime educator and arts advocate, Kathy is the author of six books, including her most recent collection of essays, Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, which was awarded the Bronze Medal in Essay for the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards and is a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Finalist. Air Into Breath, her first book of poetry, was an alternate for the Yale Series for Younger Poets, and a Colorado Book Award Winner. She currently teaches poetry and creative nonfiction for Regis University’s Mile High MFA when she is not wandering the world at 9600 ft.

kathrynwinograd.com

 

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