Eurydice

Jenny George

It snowed the day I died, a freak spring storm.
(It was in the papers.) A whole year of fruit was lost,
each snowflake traveling down from space
to touch a blossom with its cold crystal.
Now it’s nearly spring again and inside the house
the one I married is forcing quince branches
in a jar of warm water. Oh, to be chosen, given a vessel,
shaped by another’s strictures and desire! In the end
what do any of us want? Having been woken early,
brought into the human world and made to respond,
the little buds swell with their new circumstance.
The air is dense with invisible paths. The shock of fullness?
That’s called life. That stab of light is the morning sun.

What Keeps Us

Poems to Read in Community

Inspired by C. D. Wright’s poem “What Keeps,” we offer Jenny George’s “Eurydice” as part of a twenty-poem selection from poems we’ve featured in 2024—poems, like bread, that one might pass across the table—to a loved one, or to oneself. 

Read editor Lloyd Wallace’s introduction to the collection and statements from our staff readers hereRead poems by selecting below.

What Keeps

Some nights We stay up
passing it back and
forth
between us
drinking deep

Read >

This Era

Forests and cities

along the way sleep like huge dark churches.

Read >

Talisman

each of us bearing the art
in a curve of wing, a small motif
of feather,

Read >

Rewind

Have you ever seen something that buzzes inside you?
I am watching two kids encounter each other

Read >

Rationale

Because she still won’t sleep alone, you sleep deeply
with her small warm body wrapped in your arms.

Read >

Pupusas

no, the pupusa is a portrait
            of this life, crusting & breaking
                        with every lick & tooth

Read >

Psalm III

in what language should I speak to you, sun
so you’ll rise tomorrow for my child, so you’ll
rise and stimulate the growth of our food,

Read >

Night Song

You’ll never know
what became of me
in the dark, how
my body opened,

Read >

Handfuls

Summer is a pure lone mountain.
Somehow, a winter flowers against an enormous blue loneliness

Read >

Eurydice

It snowed the day I died, a freak spring storm.
(It was in the papers.)

Read >

December

Instead of snow, a dark pouring rain
to dodge as passersby reject us.  No spruces, but sycamores with their white cankers.

Read >

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Jenny George is the author of two poetry collections, After Image and The Dream of Reason, both from Copper Canyon Press. She has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Iowa Writers Workshop, Lannan Foundation, MacDowell, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, the New York Times, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works in social justice philanthropy.

After Image by Jenny George is intense and controlled and delicate, a study of character and narrative. There are mythological Greek characters presented minus the heroism, deaths that rebirth in language, and repetition of these worlds: ‘The story ends / with a wedding. Then everyone endures.’ Such strong lines make familiar images feel estranged and big statements about ‘the world’ feel wholly true. In this evocative collection, the self willingly recedes and the bees, in hope, abound.”
Poetry Northwest

“Splendid, subtle, nuanced, but ultimately punch-packed. . . . Her temperament is different from that of [someone like Robert] Lowell, more formal, quieter, often on the down-low, yet the sting is equally deep and lasting.”
—Johnny Payne, Merion West

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