For Love of Common Words: Poems (Southern Messenger Poets)

The scariest sentence in the English language is brief, threatening, and hopeful. It is deceptive, simple, and as common as water: anything is possible. This second collection by Steve Scafidi is haunted by the possible and "the bells of the verb to be" that "ring-a-ding-ding calling us / to the holy dark of this first / warm night of Spring." When anything is possible, Scafidi finds, horror is as likely as delight. In poems both meditative and defiant he mourns the eventual loss of all that we love and finds consolation, wherever possible, in the rhythm of common words and "the sacred guesswork" of the imagination. Here is the dangerous world we all have in common. Here is a brief and hopeful book.

Someone told me that a god died so we don’t have to. And yet, look. Just look at us. Nothing’s fair— people screaming, the rides too rough. And Death with his huff and puff.

There must be an atom always burning somewhere—a mansion in the sky to which we are returning. A place of real quiet, a bundle of straw where the wolf lies down by the door.

Maybe this is what our words are for. To be a lullaby for death. To know paradise in the nonsense of the poet and the scientist—to say some theory of peace to the wolf who is law. —from "Lullaby for the Wolf"

AUTHOR BIO: Steve Scafidi is the author of the poetry collection Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer, winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize. He is a cabinetmaker and lives with his family in Summit Point, West Virginia.