Elegiac Dialogues

About the Book

AUTUMN IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR Driving through autumn’s red and yellow dream— leaving as it comes— road leaves kick up and float in the rear view mirror like notes of a Mozart sonata, before falling again like bits of paper, reminders of projects I’ve started and never finished, friends I’ve let slip away and the orange I couldn‘t imagine when I was green. Passing through the smoke of burning leaves, I am wakened to the stranger I’ve become to myself since I walked away from a town between two rivers where I could hold earth and sky in my hand and every morning Meadowlarks sang for me alone. Now I ride my fugitive pony from quarry to cathedral, betrayed and benumbed by the god who came down to give us glory of flesh and the gift of sin…then ascended behind steel gray clouds, leaving me to choose everyday between hymen and hymnal, moon chalk and sun dust, scream and sob—carrying, like the wasp, my death inside.

About the Author

Larsen Bowker was born and raised in Nebraska, in the unusual part that has more trees, rivers, and more hills than flat farmland, a place rich in Arcadian legend and myth. His poems seek to reclaim something of the slow drama and texture of people’s lives before speed took away their voice and size took away their individuality. He lives now with his wife, Jeanette, on the side of a mountain in Blacksburg, Virginia, where he taught English and was varsity tennis coach at Virginia Tech for twenty-four years. Elegiac Dialogues is his seventh book of poems. He wrote a book-length critical study of John Updike’s novel The Pursuit of Permanence for his PhD at the University of Rhode Island and a study of the women in Eugene O’Neill’s plays for his master’s degree at the University of Wyoming. He’s published hundreds of poems individually in poetry magazines like Southern Humanities Review, Atlanta Review, Connecticut River Review, Poet Lore, South Carolina Review, Connecticut Review, Poem, Plainsongs, Potomac Review, and Worcester Review.