The Groundhog Poetry Press mourns its publisher, Richard H.W Dillard, who passed away April 4, 2023.
Richard was a life-changing teacher, reader and editor for countless artists. He was also a transcendent writer, a poet in the fullest sense of the word.
We’d like to share this short excerpt from his 2014 collection, Not Ideas:
April morning, pearl gray,
Five sailing geese wing by,
One honking a startling bray,
Loud, obstreperous, not high
SSW swinging S, this cry,
This hoot, this feathered noisy say-
So soon echoed by another, wry
Vernal annunciation, airy essay
In renewal, electrify-
Ing aerial double play,
Goose to goose across the sky.
Spring indeed here on the ground
As well, daffodils, tulips, jonquils,
Bursts of green and yellow, red
And white, stretching earth to sky,
Exclaiming loudly to the eye
The goosey truth that just flew by.
And a splotch of brown, the woodchuck,
Newly awake from a long winter’s nap
Underneath my bedroom window,
So delicately nibbling the first weedy
Grass, so mannerly, so alertly polite,
His brushy tail another bush
Bursting into rusty bloom beside
The scrawny yellow yawns of forsythia
Bobbing up & down, up & down,
A ragged seascape on the inland breeze.
These are some things to consider,
Things of this world (and we know,
Well-read as we are, what the poet
Said calls us to them), in every way
Worthy of investigation.
— R.H.W. Dillard
“Philosophical Investigations”
Not Ideas (Factory Hollow Press)
Fresh off the press
“How lucky we are to live on the same planet with Susan Hankla’s brain! These elegiac, droll, wise, and celebratory poems offer luminous, incisive stories of a girl learning the mysteries of family, the costumes of womanhood, the roadside bouquets of daily experience turned to revelation. Resonant as haiku, chockfull of odd gossip that carries the feel of legend, this clan-gathering of “poets’ lang-tangles” invites us to pull up a lawn chair, fill ourselves a plate, and listen. Reader, do not refuse the invitation.”
—Jeanne Larsen
SOUTH
by Duffie Taylor
BOOTLEG
by Annie Woodford
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