Ashes & Stars

Daniel Hughes  •  Edited by Mary Hughes  •  Foreword by Edward Hirsch  •  Introduction by Michael Scrivener

Contents

• Foreword
• Introduction
• Michael Scrivener

• I
  • I Whip Around
  • If We Let Go, Of Course Death Has Us
  • Back
  • Icarus
  • At Last
  • Please
  • “The Book Fell from His Hand”
  • Take the Big Subject: Exile
  • Travel
  • Torn, Filthy Maps
  • Narcissus (Caravaggio)
  • I Have Lived
  • Nature
  • Frond
  • I Have Been Wrong, Wrong, Wrong
  • Even
  • Not Seeing Vermeer

• II
  • To Charles Harte, Not Alive When Heaney Won the Nobel Prize
  • Why Didn’t You Tell Me You Were the Great Poet’s Muse?
  • Mother from Beyond the Grave
  • Soft
  • Next Time
  • Self-Wounding
  • Obituaries
  • Steve: The Silences
  • Anywhere Out of the World

• III
  • To Mary 5:00 A.M.
  • Hurt
  • Glimpse
  • Best Choices
  • O I Like
  • You Feed Me
  • The Steady-On Agnostic Needs a Muse
  • Epipsychidion Again (To Karen)
  • To K––––
  • Let It Out (To E.W.)
  • Your Dead Lovers
  • Easter 1996
  • The Divine Sparks Trapped in the World
  • Were I
  • It’s All

• IV
  • Saint Mary’s Schoolyard
  • Lament of Goliath
  • My Brutal Face Has Lasted Four Hundred Years
  • Painting Destroyed: Caravaggio
  • Berlioz Killed an Opera in His Head
  • Down
  • To a Poet
  • The Fate of Books
  • Poem
  • Reading a Writer Recently Dead
  • Not for Poets
  • After All
  • My Poem Making Its Way in the World
  • Here Come the Notes to My Poems