V E R S E ❦ I M A G E

POETRY COLLECTIONS BY BILL GRIFFIN
with sample poems, below

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Riverstory : Treestory – – – – – – – – – – $12
Crossing the River – – – – – – – – – – – – $14
little mouse – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – $5
Snake Den Ridge, a Bestiary – – – – – – -$15
Changing Woman – – – – – – – – – – – – – $5
Barb Quill Down – – – – – – – – – – – – – -$12

[only a few copies remain of Snake Den Ridge and Barb Quill Down]

Shipping costs are included in the above prices

 

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RIVERSTORY : TREESTORY (2018)

25 poems that draw the reader in and invite to become part of the stories the natural world wants to tell.

 

Bill Griffin’s Riverstory : Treestory flows and grows with ease into more runs and swings, as Nature makes its call, whether thrush or granite, seedling or shadow. “The more we wander, the less we’re lost,” he writes in “Find Me in the Woods,” a sestina open in its form to “kneeling to become a leaf.” Riverstory : Treestory is one special book, a hymn to growing things—and love, the soul awakening to join the self, singing with bird, mountain, and leaf. “All things flow.” Every stream’s “benevolent.”

– Shelby Stephenson, Poet Laureate of North Carolina, 2015-2018

With reverence and wonder, the poems in Riverstory : Treestory call the reader into a common story, one that connects all living things. But these are no ordinary nature poems. These poems are both invitation and invocation to go deeper into the world where all beings and things are connected, where the poet asks, “Could it be that curiosity shows / one’s reverence for life?” With multi-layered images and crisp language these lyrical poems seek and often find “what has never before been seen.” Bill Griffin’s poems are prayers and balm for a broken world. As he writes, “This is what we’re made for: to cup our hands and hold / a muddy bit of earth, to warm one placid creature / and then let go, the rule of reverence true love shows.” The reader may let go, but these poems will remain with you, a part of a larger story.

– Pat Riviere-Seel, author of Nothing Below but Air

I am delighted that Bill Griffin’s Riverstory : Treestory refracts not just landscape and biosphere but an entire universe, including the evening news, a friend’s marital grief, Orion’s “emerald knee moving west,” a “flycatcher’s mate” arriving “from Belize.” Humans emerge out of, intersect with, imbibe, return to nature’s “extravagant abundance.” Griffin asks the essential questions: “Who can live long apart / from the tonic of wildness?” I love the delicious pun of this one of many maxims: “Don’t kiss / God off without noticing the purple.”

– David Radavich, author of America Abroad: An Epic of Discovery

She Shows Me the Stars

Do not be afraid
of darkness – April
wants to slip
her cool night arm
around your waist
and this other
woman at your side
desires only
to show what rises
and what must recede –
she lifts
her hand to Rigel
Orion’s emerald knee
marching west making way
for season’s change
when Cygnus on broad wings
will rule Summer – by then
the sober oak that guards
our days
will flannel night
but in this moment
small heat rising
from pavement
cool breath of Spring
on our cheeks
Polaris most pale
and yet most constant
makes its way
between the twigs between
the buds
to lead us for this
is our way home.

 

[cover: photo of Mooney Falls, Nantahala National Forest,
by Gene Wilson]

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Crossing the River (2017)

77 pages, spanning forty years of reflections and experiences.

One of the nobler functions of poetry is to locate meaning and the luminous in ordinary experience. Bill Griffin’s narrative poems – about examining patients, farm life, a supermarket bagger, a grandmother’s kitchen, Pilot Mountain, apple picking, and a Great Blue Heron that “pins me to the day”– do this admirably. Readers will not easily forget scenes taken from the daily and shaped into poems of strength and compassion. Crossing the River is a rewarding book.

– Peter Makuck, author of Long Lens: New and Selected Poems

In Crossing the River, Bill Griffin preserves the humble people and places of North Carolina, carefully recording where past and present intersect. Like a plein air artist who must capture a scene before the light fades, Griffin anchors his poems in the real world of the grocery store, kitchen table, doctor’s office. A family doctor and geriatrician, he sometimes turns the mirror on himself: “what does this river care who crosses or how long? / Almost forty years for me. / It never stops learning. / I’ll take a lesson.” This is a deeply personal collection that ponders the truth of human choices.

– Alice Osborn, author of Heroes without Capes

Griffin’s new collection opens masterfully with these lines from the first poem Care,“She opens the jeweled box of care / and unfolds first one / then another…,” as does the reader with this book, unfolding these pages and the thoughtful poetry contained within. These well-crafted poems are lyrical, rich with imagery and in some way are all connected to nature, to the earth.
I find this collection spiritual, even magical. Bill Griffin writes with both clarity and depth, capturing the reader’s imagination, while subtly exploring the human condition. A beautiful book of poetry.

– Jonathan K. Rice, editor of Iodine

Every Child

That spring the headlines grieved:
Lindbergh’s Baby Kidnaped,
a mourning cloak that settled heavy
across the shoulders of every neighborhood.
Our sky lowered itself to rebuke
tulips and hyacinths, to renounce
all green, all color,
and the late snow drifted lawns
like an infant’s down bunting.

Why should I have expected my daughter
to contain her four-year old squeals
at the hills’ white-lofted magic?
The sled dragged forth, her pink knit cap,
the azalea’s pink hope smothered
and struggling like the fists of babies;
our flowered Easter frocks
smothered under damp black wool,
the opened tomb no consolation
for a son’s shallow grave.

But my child lived – you are here, Great-grandson –
and I turn these clippings over to you,
but can I turn over all my grief? Remember
that the thousands you can’t conceive
are born as ones – just one
stolen through a nursery window,
beneath a wave, before
the black mouth of a soldier’s barrel,
and every mother knows
the loss of every child.

 

[cover: graphic image by April Bleakney taken from a photograph by Bill Griffin
of the Yadkin River at the old Rte 21 bridge, now demolished]

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little mouse (2011)

32 poems, each in the same 20-line form, each with the same title, each speaking in a different voice. Parent or infant, exploring or fearful, oppressed or joyful, each of us will discover ourselves somewhere within these lines. For after all, which of us can say that we have never at some point felt small, gray, and capable of biting?

“From the tradition of Randall Jarrell’s bat poet comes Bill Griffins little mouse, singing us the “earth story.” Part book of psalms, part primer on the human condition, these gentle lyrics take us on a journey through the richness that is life, with all its mystery and paradox, where the dread that comes in one breath is answered by joy in the next. This is our story, and little mouse our spirit guide, offering us these “few terse squeakes that mostly have to do with yes.” Yes, I say, to these straight-to-the-heart songs. Yes to each moment that little mouse illuminates and shines back to us. Little mouse, of course, says it best: “The simplest things reveal the greatest.” This is a book to which I will return again and again, carrying it with me like a prayer or a friend.”  – – –  Rhett Iseman Trull, author of The Real Warnings, winner of the 2008 Anhinga Prize for poetry.

little mouse
(hello)

Is this the hunger squeak
that drowses up from your milky world
into ours? Or the night squeak
of cold toes pushed past
the flannel of their brothers?

Afternoon ticks away like squeaks
of cradle rocking on uneven oak,
the neighbor’s westie barks
from a distant realm. A squeak
of smile brief as sunclouds – O!

let us all sleep and wake
and sleep again to dream of little mouse
who retells the earth story
in sharp-toothed tenor, truth that swaddles
each one of us at the breast

of one mother. Slow and constant
mosslight seeps beneath our lids, we see
with lips, with tongue, with cheek,
our restless small squeakings
now quieted. And fed.

[cover photograph by Jarrod Reindollar]

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Snake Den Ridge, a Bestiary (2008)

Snake Den Ridge is a remote section of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In each poem in this collection, one of the wild mountain creatures speaks its mind, from Beetle to Bear and Hawk to Salamander. Some are humorous, some plaintive, a couple are belligerent, but all are quite personal. What they have to teach us may be best expressed in these lines from the Preface (an essay on the bestiary as literary form by historian and artist Linda French Griffin): Once again literature and line drawing join in celebration of a fabulist natural world, where creatures voice moral messages potentially more urgent for humanity than isolated, personal salvation: “You are not alone. All life is one. We are in this together. For our mutual survival — and Earth’s very salvation — you must recognize and learn to appreciate this connection.”

Linda’s drawings accompany each poem and include native Appalachian flora as well. At the end of the book is a listing of all the creatures and plants mentioned in the poems or depicted, with Latin binomials.

“The animals speaking in Bill Griffin’s Snake Den Ridge might well have wandered up to your porch to tell you what’s on their minds. No obviously symbolic creatures are these! Raven, Skunk, Squirrel, even Millipede speak with distinctive voices. I wanted to carry on the conversation long after the last poem!”   – – – Kathryn Stripling Byer, North Carolina Poet Laureate

Salamander

This is my gift –
to change.
From Inadu Creek I leave behind
my frilly gills and climb
the spire of blue-eyed grass.
Having become a creature of air bathing
myself in dew, am I not still
a creature of water?

I invite you to discover
in each of my family our variations,
discern that every runnel, every spring,
every palm-sized cup of moisture
holds its lithe expectation, for this
is my gift to you –
to notice changes.

I will let you lightly touch
the welcome of my smoothness
while I drink a little warmth
from your hand. Now count
the dapples down my length,
measure the blush of my cheek,

then find when you descend
the eastern face of Snake Den Ridge
those subtle alterations my cousins
are accumulating until finally
they acquire a new name.

And when you have returned me
to my bed of blue-bead lily, then touch
a smooth place within yourself
and carry with you into the world
your own changes.

[cover and illustrations by Linda French Griffin]

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Changing Woman (2006)

– – – For Linda changing / and changing me. These poems explore the relationship between men and women, from the mundane to the sudden epiphany, from longing to fulfillment (and sometimes back to longing). Since there are never words for how we really feel about each other, poetry must attempt to fill the gap.

Changing Woman is a central figure in Dinetah (Navajo) creation mythology. Through her marriage to Sun all human beings emerge, but she laments to her husband: You are constant in your brightness, but I must change with the seasons!

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Mint

Clumsy, abrupt, pulling weeds
in the bed of bee balm,
each four-walled stem
seals its bruise with a gift of mint,
perfumes our sweat with the welcoming
scent of Oswego tea
while butterflies applaud and hummingbirds
tipple from the red-fringed heads.

Oh, my dear, if our own bruises,
the bitterness of a graceless reach,the salt of our labored silences
could all be healed by the hovering
of invisible wings
and a leaf’s sweetness, first released
in tears and breaking.

(Mint was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2003)

[cover photograph by Gene Wilson, Mt. Jefferson, North Carolina]

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Barb Quill Down (2004)

 

Barbs connect, the quill raises, down softens – it requires all three to make a feather. Although this is not a book about birds, in each poem appears a bird, a feather, flight. And the cover art is a charcoal rendering by Clara C. “Cookie” Griffin, my mother.

Barb Quill Down was a finalist in the 2003 National Looking Glass Chapbook Competition from Pudding House Publications.

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Burn Away

Creatures that live for fire,
for flame to burn away the chaff and scrub,
a blaze to awaken the stone heart
and scour the pond pine seeds to life,
to open the longleaf cone like the mouth
of a fruitful distending womb –

Let it burn low and sweet
where roots securely sleep beneath
the sucking wet pocosin bed;
let it burn all, all about us let it burn
to consume the empty clinging husks,
the dragging tangle of exhausted vines

While we perch as high on the trunk
as the red-emblazoned woodpeckers,
rare, defiant, creatures of heartwood
and dangerous pungent sap —
let the acrid heat ascend, let tears of healing flow,
invite the clarifying flames that rise and let it
burn, let it burn as we become
creatures that live for fire.

[cover art is a charcoal rendering by Clara C. “Cookie” Griffin, my mother]

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