Cave Moon Press

FEATURED POET: Peter Marcus.  [Jack Estes reports:] I'm writing to tell you about a new collection of poetry from Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press. The title is DARK SQUARE, and it's written by Manhattan poet Peter Marcus. Although this is his first collection, he's had most of these poems published already in some of the country's best poetry journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Southern Poetry Review, North American Review, Iowa Review, Harvard Review, and over a dozen others. In other words, his poems have withstood the test of modern editors. I'm not surprised. They're stunning, very personal and still accessible, very thoughtful and still clear. 

Peter is a psychologist as well as a poet, and that background naturally comes out in many of the poems. He has traveled widely, also, and his poems reveal his intense interest in and eye for the various cultures he has witnessed: Mexican, South Asian, Eastern European, Central Asian, American Southwest. The book also includes love poems and poignant poems of family.

Go to our website at www.pleasureboatstudio.com for an image of the cover and for ordering information. Peter's book is now available from Pleasure Boat Studio for $14.95 (www.pleasureboatstudio.com). If you order one before Dec. 1st, we will pay for shipping. What a deal!! You can also get this book from amazon.com or bn.com.

Dark Square

We all die dreaming something of this world:

its eggs, dust, feathers,

and its body of bread.

             On moonless nights

the whole house sways

with sleep.

            At dawn, a marlin arcs and wavers

toward the Mexican sun.

Murmuring children pass

through the graveyard gates, carrying little pines

Peter Marcus

Statue of Eros Without Wings Dark Square

I think there was no joy
in what was fought for.
Welts where the wings were.
A few feathers of a hen
after the fox has run.
What of the wholeness his body
wanted to belong to? Bone-yellow
hunk of torso bolted to a pedestal.
The radiance used up.
Only his heart lost within stone,
working like wings: that pitiful
flapping as he plummets.

Peter Marcus

Write your poem!
Alliteration or allusion?  Given Western cultures traditions around referencing religions, how does it influence your poems?  For all the Romantic traditions of Poe or Blake, how does this filter into your poem?  Try out a couple of ideas.  Write them down on a credit card bill envelope.  Put it in the mail....