Evening All of a Sudden by David Wyatt.

A plug for my writing mentor's new book.

My good buddy David Wyatt has a new book out from Wayne State Press. Wayne State Press is a great little poetry press in Northeast Nebraska. I think you can order the book on their website, or on amazon. David is pretty old school and doesn’t much care to use the internets, or substack for that matter, so im just gonna go ahead and do it for him. The dude taught me everything I know about poetry, directly or indirectly through heaps of chap books and reading recommendations.

God bless,

Jim

Wayne State Press Website

Order "Evening All of a Sudden" on Amazon

Evening All of A Sudden

Tonight the world has soft hands.

Stretching clouds into thin taffy.

Even the paperboy throws late news

On the porch without shattering the quiet.

Of course, this is Grandma’s house,

She very likely the only one on the block

Who reads the funnies, has time

For the tea kettle’s whistle while she sorts

Through scraps of cloth, possibility

In a new shirt, her once-dead husband,

Sitting across from her, saying he’s thrilled

At the chance of another miracle.

Granted, a crow may shout through

Several open windows, sensing complete darkness,

Yet there are also other things

To be known, whenever voices become various songs,

Stars above, choosing their favorites.

David Wyatt

Caption from the back of the chap book.

“The poems in David Wyatt’s Evening All of a Sudden tremble with a solemn, introspective rhythm, complementing the collection’s echo of spirituality without dogma, where a crow or an ant is as much a man as a man, where God is as likely to be found in a creature as on the barstool next to us. The world can be welcoming, indifferent, or downright bitter, and this collection covers the spectrum with a casual humility only obtained through a lifetime of well-pondered experience. Evening All of a Sudden is steady and almost unnervingly human, mirroring the resilient acceptance of the poet. Some of the poems are narrative, others concisely lyrical, most a rebellious blend, but almost all share an enduring nostalgia for the illusion of youth, for a shifting generational landscape, for a time when children were taught to wave to strangers.

David Wyatt’s poems are as much about language―its consolations and fractures, its endless utility and absurdity―as they are about trees, rain, mercy, dogs, and death, those “Discoveries made along dull ground” that coruscate into existential riddles and gnomic koans. Socrates and Rilke share strophes here with cafes and hotels, palm readers and blackbirds nested in interlaced clauses easy to read but hard to diagram. Yet for all the wry subtlety of these sidelong philosophies, one turns the corner of page after page to revelatory vistas of a world brimming with flotsam worth seeing again, “Given the object could be something / Slender and pulsing, stalk-legged, prayerful, / Grafted also from the Milky Way.”
–Todd Robinson, author of Mass for Shut-Ins