Everything Repeated Many Times
Poetry
As a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Center, Brendan-Brown is widely published in journals such as the Notre Dame Review, Wisconsin Review, Indiana Review, Texas Review, Poetry East, Southampton Review, and elsewhere. He received a 1997 NEA Poetry Fellowship.
“Everything Repeated Many Times” captures the struggles that make life beautiful and hopeful even amongst heartbreak and loss.
For Leda
By Sean Brendan-Brown
Death is the occasion; grieve not
a life steeped in cruelties now ended
for there is only echo from the wake
rebounding to a whisper then still:
never ask for a better season
this was warm enough, cool enough
dry enough, rain enough, enough.
Yesterday sorrow dug our eyes out,
exhaustion glued them in. I cannot
pray unassisted–broken like this I
am a child empty-headed — give
words and I shall spit them out
without the thousand proofs I once
required of a divine ear: I am
stepping out into rain to gather roses
to slap their heads off to strew, to strew.
“Not since Raymond Carver has a writer more clearly shared the vagaries, joys, and comedy of human existence, while revealing the salvation in it for us all.”
About the Author
A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Sean Brendan-Brown has been published in the Notre Dame Review, Wisconsin Review, Indiana Review, Texas Review, Poetry East, Southampton Review, and elsewhere. He received a 1997 NEA Poetry Fellowship and a 2010 NEA Fiction Fellowship.
