Tend
Feature Date
- January 31, 2025
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“Tend” from Green for Luck: by Margaret Yapp.
Published by Eastover Press April 23, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Margaret Yapp.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Green for Luck is a book that wanders green city blocks, denying happenstance and making lists. Yapp attends to mundanity as a string that holds us close to the earth, building quotidian divinities, landing jokes just to make sure we’re listening. In this book, words push the left and upper margins, forcing the body of the page to act as negative space, a place where the light gets in.
Green for Luck speaks through Scrabble, through text messages, through gossip and snippets of conversation and well-worn idioms that crack open in Yapp’s steady hands. The cacophony of voices is a blurred, gentle cyclone. Green for Luck listens as much as it speaks; Green for Luck listens so it can speak. And behind each word, its corresponding object is transfigured by being named. Behind each line, a glacial erratic resting on unfamiliar stone. Behind each poem, boundless grasslands where the speaker recognizes itself as a gap in the world, similarly vast but horizontal against the cyclical.
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