My Bishop and Other Poems

By Michael Collier

Think of a time when you’ve feigned courage to make a friend, feigned forgiveness to keep one, or feigned indifference to simply stay out of it. What does it mean for our intimacies to fail us when we need them most?

The poems of this collection explore such everyday dualities—how the human need for attachment is as much a source of pain as of vitality and how our longing for transcendence often leads to sinister complicities. The title poem tells the conflicted and devastating story of the poet’s friendship with the now-disgraced Bishop of Phoenix, Arizona, interweaving fragments of his parents’ funerals, which the Bishop concelebrated, with memories of his childhood spiritual leanings and how they were disrupted by a pedophilic priest the Bishop failed to protect him from.

This meditation on spiritual life, physical death, and betrayal is joined by an array of poised, short lyrics and expansive prose poems exploring how the terror and unpredictability of our era intrudes on our most intimate moments. Whether Michael Collier is writing about an airline disaster, Huey Newton’s trial, Thomas Jefferson’s bees, a piano in the woods, or his own fraught friendship with the disgraced Catholic Bishop, his syntactic verve, scrupulously observed detail, and flawless ear bring the felt—and sometimes frightening—dimensions of the mundane to life. Throughout, this collection pursues a quiet but ferocious need to get to the bottom of things.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Feb 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9780226571058

Michael Collier

Michael Collier has been the director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and has taught English at the University of Maryland, College Park. His previous volumes of poetry are THE CLASP AND OTHER POEMS, THE FOLDED HEART, THE NEIGHBOR, and THE LEDGE, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Collier is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, NEA fellowships, and the Discovery/The Nation Award, among other honors. He resides in Maryland.

Book preview

My Bishop and Other Poems

My Bishop and Other Poems

Michael Collier

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago & London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by The University of Chicago.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-57086-0 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-57105-8 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226571058.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Collier, Michael, 1953–

Title: My bishop and other poems / Michael Collier.

Other titles: Phoenix poets.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Series: Phoenix poets

Identifiers: LCCN 2017056943 | ISBN 9780226570860 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226571058 (e-book)

Classification: LCC PS3553.O474645 A6 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017056943

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

for Stanley Plumly

and Ellen Bryant Voigt

Contents

Acknowledgments

Meadow

· · ·

A Wild Tom Turkey

Strands of Hair in a Used Book

Three

Jefferson’s Bees

Early Summer

To a Lemon

Len Bias, a Bouquet of Flowers, and Ms. Brooks

Emily Dickinson

Koi

· · ·

Boom Boom

My Bishop

Anecdote of the Piano in the Woods

· · ·

Vitalis

The Storm

My Father as a Maple Tree

Last Morning with Steve Orlen

Funky Stuff

To Isabella Franconati

· · ·

Bronze Foot in a Glass Case

Notes

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the editors of the following magazines in which these poems first appeared:

Birmingham Poetry Review (Spring 2017): "My Bishop"

B O D Y (June 30, 2014): "My Father as a Maple Tree" (http://bit.ly/1mcQ7fE)

B O D Y (April 3, 2017): "Meadow" (bodyliterature.com/2017/04/03/michael-collier-2/)

Cortland Review (Winter 2014): "The Menagerie at Versailles: Haiku from Samuel Johnson’s Diary and To a Lemon" (http://www.cortlandreview.com/features/14/winter/collier.php#1)

Greensboro Review (2015): "Last Morning with Steve Orlen"

Ibbetson Street 35 (June 2014): "Anecdote of the Piano in the Woods"

Kenyon Review (September / October 2017): "The Storm"

Ploughshares (Spring 2016): "A Wild Tom Turkey"

Plume 43 (February 2015): "To Isabella Franconati" (http://plumepoetry.com/2015/02/to-isabella-franconati/)

The Southampton Review (Summer / Fall 2017), "Koi"

"Bronze Foot in a Glass Case" appeared in Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry, edited by Sydney Lea and Chard deNiord (Green Writers Press, 2017).

"Jefferson’s Bees" appeared in Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poems on Jefferson, edited by Lisa Russ Spaar (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016).

"Last Morning with Steve Orlen" also appeared in Poetry Daily and in BestAmerican Poetry 2016, edited by Edward Hirsch