10.27.15: Beverly Voigt

As Voigt is quite a reserved and private person, I am always surprised and delighted by her insight, and her generosity to share herself with the reader. She is intelligent and has a quiet grace about her and through her work. What I appreciate about her poetry is the quiet way in which her poems unfold and reveal themselves: no loud bangs and thrashing metaphors, no hyperbole of language, but a certain knowing that she is at work and in service of the poem. And respectful of her art, the reader, and her subject. Beverly writes often of her upbringing in Pittsburgh. Coming from a large family, many of her poems are of  the reunions, dinners, or get-togethers on the house porch or in a historic restaurant in her home town.  Her closeness to nature, how she walks through the world in wonder of the forests, and what she chooses to see, is a source of great joy to her, and a source of wonderful poetry of the natural world, for us.
                                                                                                                                                            -- Carine Topal

Blue Mother
  
All that long night we hovered,
all of us in the room, watching
her slow retreat. Her feet
so cold, her fingers
going blue.
 
Again and again
she raised her arm, wanting
out, wanting back.
Again and again, I guided it
down to the bed. All the care
she’d given me, repaid
in such a small gift.
 
Blue mother in the bed--
Venus in marble—glowing
down that long hallway. Legs
in folds of winding sheets.
One shoulder shrugging off
the world, the other arm
missing, reaching.
 
I think of the apple tree
in blossom whose branch
I’d once pulled toward me.
Whoa, I whispered, when it reared
in the wind. I’ve got you.

                                                                             Beverly Voigt

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