Poetry Monday: Jeri Kroll

Sometimes on a Friday afternoon, as a kind of preparation for poetry Monday, I like to run my fingers along the poetry section of my bookshelf, eyes glazed as if I were feeling braille.  I have so many appealing looking poetry books (and more arriving daily) that I haven't yet read, with names that might or might not be familiar to me.  I'll usually just pick one up that seems to feel right against my hands, and begin reading.  Sometimes the poetry isn't right for my mood, so I put it back and try again.  This Friday I picked up Jeri Kroll's workshopping the heart.  I was instantly  drawn by the themes of Kroll's work: parenting, aging, the continual bisection of love, grief, and loss, and the relationship between the universe, nature and the human. So much of this work resonated immediately with my own experience and emotions at the moment.  And this was before I knew that Kroll was a NYC girl who spent summers in the Catskill mountains, whose mother was a singer, and who now lives in Australia.  Obviously we have similar reference points, and if she were in NSW, I'd invite her to dinner immediately.  As it is, I'm going to email her publisher (Wakefield Press) and line up an interview (I'll let you know when...). Workshopping the Heart includes selections from her seven previous collections, poems from 2005 to 2012, and excerpts from her forthcoming verse novel, Vanishing Point.  Here's a little taste taken from her poem "Eavesdropping" (how can I resist a poem set at Tidbinbilla's Deep Space Tracking Centre): 

On a noisy planet, Australia rates as quiet.
The radio telescope is set to scan
the silent skies. Scientists link up
around the world.  Soon the whoosh of space 
appears on their computer screens.
They have 'seen' the pulse of emptiness.
They want a new vibration from some extraterrestrial heart.

The universe sounds like a distant wind
with nothing to bang or rustle.
We invent a door, push it ajar,
and wait to hear it rattle.