The Complete Poems

Originally from Park River, North Dakota, Roland Flint was the author of eight collections of poems, including the 1990 National Poetry Series selection, Stubborn. He received a 1982 National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Discovery Grant from the same auspices in 1970. His work appeared in Triquarterly, Salmagundi, Poetry Northwest, Ohio Review, and The Atlantic, among other publications. He was professor of English at Georgetown University for 29 years and...
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Originally from Park River, North Dakota, Roland Flint was the author of eight collections of poems, including the 1990 National Poetry Series selection, Stubborn. He received a 1982 National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Discovery Grant from the same auspices in 1970. His work appeared in Triquarterly, Salmagundi, Poetry Northwest, Ohio Review, and The Atlantic, among other publications. He was professor of English at Georgetown University for 29 years and was on the teaching staff at Warren Wilson College and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. As Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1995 to 2000, he traveled to every county in the state, taking poetry into schools, prisons and hospitals. He died in 2001.

This newly available Complete Poems brings together in one volume all of the poems from Roland Flint's published books.

Linda Pastan has said of Roland Flint's work, "Whenever I read Roland Flint's poetry, I am brought to tears. I'm not sure whether I cry from the power of the emotions the poems raise or from the simple beauty of language that can produce such emotions. No matter: Roland Flint is one of our best poets."

Michael Collier writes, "The cores of his poems are like small prayers, and they have the attitude of prayers. He was really a secular poet who was able to find evidence of God's grace everywhere."

Here are two excerpts:

The Green For Pamela

After she had witnessed and somehow survived her twin brother's death, my daughter Pamela and I would lie across the bed, staring out the window at dusk, and see what human faces and animal shapes we could see or make in the waving green tops of the darkening trees.

When the streetlights came on, it was different, and beautiful still: the leaves, resuming green, were on our side of the lamp, the light lighting the tree and shining through to us, like daytime--cleaner, though, and greener.

But it was best just before the lights came on: we would be there and talk and wait for a little dark and a little wind to make the trees move and sough and whisper as they rearranged the human faces and animal shapes of night--an elephant nodding, a dog wagging or leaping, Mr. Bishop's face in Mr. Bishop' s tree.

It's been three years and I don't remember now if I knew those nights I was leaving, I don't think so. But we had already left the happy shouting, the dancing, wrestling and marching games before bed.

And we were looking for a quiet way to translate night into the green human faces and animal shapes we knew to move in the sun all day and to wait all night for our return, resuming green.

Skin

If the wood is good grain,
and the carpenter, the fit, the caulking,
the cask will be good
and if the grapes are good the wood and the wine
will improve each other,
in the dark long days of aging.

The separate tastes of earth
will taste again and change again each other,
until, like membrane, somehow
in and between the wood and wine
there will be no separation,
wood from dark from wine.

When this goes on, anything can happen.
Go back, go back to mystery.
Now I am grateful to my small poem
for teaching me this again:
that my God is still the moment
where the wood is no longer itself,
where the wine is no longer, only, itself.