Quarter Blend Polly
Poems
- Arts & Literature
- Publisher: Resource Publications (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2025
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Publisher's Description
In these poems, Fitzpatrick weaves story and song, narrative and image, free verse and traditional forms to spin a yarn of life and art. These are poems of place, first and last of the rich riverbend tableau of New Orleans, but also of Greece and Spain, of Tampa and Paris and Oxford. Along the way the speaker's voice meets those of dozens of artists, from Wangechi Mutu and Picasso to Dante and Homer. The result is a pageant as various and riotous as that of life in New Orleans itself, and the invitation throughout is that of grace.
Endorsements (4)
“These are intricate poems of precise observation and great spiritual seriousness. They do not shy away from the brokenness of the world, but they hold on to an aching hope for healing, a hope that ‘this ache is no false promise.’” —Steven Knepper, professor of English, Virginia Military Institute “Fitzpatrick’s musical and mysterious verse leads readers into a ‘Lazarus world’ where even the simple moment of a leaf falling into a cup can pull us into places of remembrance and resurrection. Culture and nature are layered with meaning in this collection; the poet calls us to look closely at everything from sculptures to silkworms. Like the beloved mentor in his poem ‘The Death of the Art Teacher,’ Fitzpatrick ‘love[s] to show [us] how to see the world.’”
“These are masterful poems capable of being formally rich and elegantly moving, but also, at times, very funny. Though what truly distinguishes these poems is Daniel Fitzpatrick’s profound sense of wonder, whether considering art, nature, or matters of faith. If the world is going to be saved by beauty, we need more poems like these, poems awake to the light and darkness of a given moment and written with a unique beauty of their own.”
“Daniel Fitzpatrick’s poems hold a teeming world, thick with detail. They signal their urgency in the relentless coming-around of couplet rhymes, in terse dimeter and trimeter, and in painterly renderings of visionary artists and saints, ‘eyes in skulls of white flame.’ The universe these poems invoke shimmers with stark particularities, but also with mystery, terrible and beautiful. This is a universe meant for eternity but always, inexorably, ‘flowing . . . into time.’”
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