Full-Length Books
Good Work
Winner of 2019 Sinclair Poetry Prize
Evening Street Press
“For many years, in many poems, Matthew Spireng has watched the world and himself with close and patient attention. In poems arising from farming, or logging, or writing and reading, there are strong portrayals of failure and success, danger and safety, or doubt and certainty. One source of the richness in this book is that you have to wait for each poem to tell you, in a given case, which side of the question might be better. It depends on the feeling, which Spireng gets profoundly right time after time.”
—Henry S. Taylor, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winner, 1986
Good Work
Good work, I thought today, is the muse,
the fount of creation, the spark that lights
the wick that lights the way to writing a poem.
I was raking stones with a shovel along the driveway
to gather them in piles and shovel them up to place them
in the wheelbarrow to dump in the potholes winter
and the spring thaw had conspired to create.
There was such a profusion the eight-hundred feet
from town road to garage had to be driven
like a slalom course, though with no chance of success.
The ping of the pebbles in the metal wheelbarrow
punctuated the work. A neighbor honked and waved.
It was too much to do in the time at hand and,
though I’d hoped to get a third of the work done,
I could only come close. But I’d done enough to see
that the stones thrown to the side of the drive by the plow
would nowhere near fill all of the potholes that gaped.
Still, as I’d thought, it was good work, better
than idleness, better than napping, better than
nothing at all. I could see what I’d accomplished, and
when I drove out I could feel good work still to be done.
What Focus Is
WordTech Editions
“This new collection of poems continues the project that Matthew Spireng has been pursuing for the past four decades—the making of well-crafted poems that reveal the poetry in the events of every day, those apparently ordinary moments when we do and see ourselves and the world around us with extraordinary clarity. Every page of this book contains such moments, crystalized into gems of recognition, surprise, laughter, deep feeling and true understanding, and each page compels the reader to turn to the next page eagerly to see what’s next.”
— R. H. W. Dillard
What Focus Is
… as beauty
makes background of all around it.
– Les Murray, “The Emerald Dove”
This a bald eagle, the first seen
so all else—the smooth curve
of the road ahead, the distant view across
fields and hedgerows into a green valley—
is lost, guessed at now, though the eagle close
and magnificent flying up from the shoulder
only yards from the car is as clear in memory
as if a photo had been snapped that instant,
even the eyes, head turned toward the car, sharp.
Only the bird, and background, beauty and background,
as the bird soaring might find beauty itself: one hare
seen first from afar, then, as if tethered together,
the magnificent bird swoops down out of the background,
focused only on the beauty it sees—the hare in a field
filled with clover it does not see—to pluck it up from the ground.
Out of Body
Winner of 2004 Bluestem Poetry Award
Bluestem Press at Emporia State University
“Gravity that the knowledge of death brings to life weights Out of Body. Grounded in the flesh, this rigorous poetry is an uncompromising encounter with reality. Yet, each poem is underpinned with tenderness and seeks a grace that approaches the sacramental. Posited in a somber awareness that the living need hope even where there is none, poem after poem confronts suffering in order to arouse compassion for those in the moment when breath fails. One particularly memorable poem is about a killdeer whose nest has been destroyed by a tractor. The speaker follows the bird, ‘giving her hope, false as it is, her birdwork is right for this world.’ With persistent care for the subject, whether a cow that died in a breech birth or one of the 1200 people lost in the 1871 Peshtigo fire. Matthew Spireng honors each being by depicting its end. In preserving the sanctity of life no matter how small, poems in Out of Body teach the heart to persevere, to cherish the surprising twists, the joy to be found in the journey.”
— Vivian Shipley, Bluestem Contest Judge 2004
Killdeer after a Late Planting in Corn
She cries and cries, trying to lead me
away from the nest she can no longer find
the disk's destroyed, the tractor's run
over, her eggs or young turned under
as she feigned a hurt and cried to that roar
in vain to draw it away as if it were
a predator stalking its prey. At first I follow
because my goal's her way—the end
of the drive and the road to be walked—
but then as she flies in another direction
and lands, crying and crying, I turn
and follow just her, giving her hope,
false as it is, her birdwork is right
for this world.