May Day: Poems

You arrive at my altar
with no idea

what it means to worship--to adore.
You haven't even learned it:

ecstasy and suffering
make the same face.

--from "The Offering"

May Day is both a distress call and a celebration of the arrival of spring. In this rich and unusually assured first collection, the poet Gretchen Marquette writes of the losses of a brother gone off to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a great love--losses that have left the world charged with absence and grief. But there is also t...