http://www.valmorehouse.com So many poems which sweeten on loss. Sun, 09 Aug 2009 18:11:32 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en       One thought drops across the hillside. Its facets shine along cold furrows, breaking into consciousness, slide down deliberate as rain into pipes a hollow silver into troughs their green arms open into ruts full up with a brown laughter into old weeds a joyous handshaking after young ducks chuckling even as bridesmaids their white wings floating through each puddle and every pool the pale color pouring across ... http://www.valmorehouse.com/?p=30 Click title to read each haiku: August (Haiku) Baseball Season (Haiku)   Crickets (Haiku)   Grass Dancer (Haiku) The Concealment (Haiku)     ______© Val Morehouse, 5 Haiku writing and poetry http://www.valmorehouse.com/?p=125 Read the fifteen perfect lines opening screenwriter David Benioff’s novel, City of Thieves, and you will be hooked. Transported into the Nazi siege of Leningrad, with the Russian winter clamped down harder than God’s fist, you become third-party to the abomination of war and fanatic politics, and eavesdrop on conversation ... http://www.valmorehouse.com/?p=122 Bright-faced flowers and bushes circle these old foundations, the way wagons rolling West once curved in defense of life and limb. This is the country where seasons still bloom from memory to hope.   Settlers have put down 30-year stakes and nested here on the well-kempt streets, caped inside green yards played by stair-step next ... http://www.valmorehouse.com/?p=121 If, according to Bob White of the Allentown Morning Call, “[Hell] is full of overpaid, outsourcing, golden-parachuting, employee-abusing, worms...”; then Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, This land is our their land: reports from a divided nation, documents what a “heck-of-a-job” this “market is deity” crowd has done on the country ... http://www.valmorehouse.com/?p=120 _____"Librarians much prefer reading to the 'infantry' rather than becoming the infantry in a cultural war." With the sound of one small snick it begins. A tiny fiction struck by hand across the truth, like red phosphorous on a matchstick it conjures A devil's firework of intimidation from the once inert ground of sulfur, KClO3, and ... http://www.valmorehouse.com/?p=118 Indignation, Philip Roth's newest, is a small but potent box of surprises: a little J.D. Salinger, a bit of Henry James, and a dash of Alice Sebold's voice from beyond.  Roth follows sophomore college student Marcus Messner from his Newark Jewish neighborhood to Ohio's WASP Winesburg College. A master ... http://www.valmorehouse.com/?p=113   When a spiritual polymath with a poetic voice encounters a worthy biographer, who is himself an expert in French poetry,  thorough researcher, sensitive interpreter, and eloquent writer, the result is stunning.  Such is Spiritual Radical, volume two in Edward K. Kaplan's study of Abraham Joshua Heschel, a foremost thinker ... http://www.valmorehouse.com/?p=111 Popping pills? Suicide? Lethal injections? These are reasons given [CC Times, 11/6/2007, A1] for two mothers’ request for removal of Lois Lowry’s prizewinning novel The Giver from all Mount Diablo Schools reading lists and libraries. Not so fast. Before we “burn” this book, readers should ... http://www.valmorehouse.com/?p=92 "Old woman, where is it? Give it up!" You crouch saying nothing. "Nothing?" One soldier ravishes a green crust jaded with mold, your answer, from the small box of your body. Like opals your eyes alarm them. Faces consume your last moments, but soldiers cannot devour your miserable crust, or your tears not different from diamonds, or wind that curls snail-like ... http://www.valmorehouse.com/?p=91