Thanking the Muses

Sarcophagus known as the "Muses Sarcophagus", representing the nine Muses and their attributes. Marble, first half of the 2nd century AD, found by the Via Ostiense. |MR 880 (Ma 475) |Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, Denon  (Wiki image is in the public domain)

I'm happy to say that I've completed a draft of my next poetry book, a manuscript consisting of  fifty-four poems, divided into four sections, each based on a phrase from King David's Psalms.

There's even one section of "light" poems such as parodies, epigrams, and a physics-based riddle.

This will be my most personal book to date, with poems inspired by the deaths of my mother and father (July 2011 and August 2012, respectively), my daughter's near death from a ruptured cerebral aneurysm in June-July 2012, and the euthanasia of my beloved dog, in October 2012.

Themes include suicide, the Catholic Church abuse scandal, Sandy Hook, OCD, war, a nod to Pablo Neruda, and of course faith, hope and love.

Two translations, one from French (Émile Nelligan) and one from Spanish (María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira) also make their début in this MS.

Forms include blank verse, lyric and narrative sonnets, heroic couplets, Sapphics, heterometrical sestets, cinquains, quatrains, ottava rima, villanelle, ovillejo, elegy, Fibonacci, ballad, haiku, modified cento. Some free verse as well. ;-)

Will be polishing for submission to prospective publishers in the fall, God willing.