1972–2012
Irony the enemy unto death of truth,
history his unflinching gaze, the lyrical
frontal assault his arsenal: not the bird,
not the song of the bird, but the beak,
talons, feathers and wings of the bird.
And wouldn’t you know, today I heard
of his passing, today with my head
buried in the slender body of his poems,
those little fickle songbirds of the South,
their unironic tone, their lyric joust,
their laying bare in metaphor as stark
as paper shacks against a Delta moon.
Today the murmurous starlings are mute.
Oh irony, that everlasting glottal stop.
George Drew is the author of The View from Jackass Hill, 2010 winner of the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, Texas Review Press, which also has just published his chapbook, Down & Dirty (2015), and will publish his New & Selected, Pastoral Habits, in Jan/ Feb 2016. His sixth collection, Fancy’s Orphan, is due out in January 2017, from Tiger Bark Press. He is the winner of the 2014 St. Petersburg Review poetry contest. Originally from Mississippi, he lives in upstate New York.
