Ruth Hulburt Hamilton - Song for a Fifth Child (Babies Don't Keep)

Song for a Fifth Child, also known as Babies Don't Keep, is a famous poem written by Ruth Hulburt Hamilton. It was first published in the Ladies' Home Journal in 1958. The text of the poem begins with "Mother, oh Mother, come shake out your cloth" and concludes with "I'm rocking my baby and babies don't keep." The poem highlights a mother who chooses to ignore endless household tasks - like doing dishes, cleaning, and paying bills - to spend precious time rocking and playing with her child. It speaks to the fleeting childhood of children and the core of its message is that messy houses can wait, but  children can not. They grow up fast ("babies don't keep").

Song for a Fifth Child

by Ruth Hulburt Hamilton

Mother, oh Mother, come shake out your cloth,
Empty the dustpan, poison the moth,
Hang out the washing and butter the bread,
Sew on a button and make up a bed.
Where is the mother whose house is so shocking?
She’s up in the nursery, blissfully rocking.

Oh, I’ve grown shiftless as Little Boy Blue

(Lullaby, rockaby, lullaby loo).

Dishes are waiting and bills are past due

(Pat-a-cake, darling, and peek, peekaboo).

The shopping’s not done and there’s nothing for stew
And out in the yard there’s a hullabaloo
But I’m playing Kanga and this is my Roo.
Look! Aren’t her eyes the most wonderful hue?

(Lullaby, rockaby, lullaby loo).

The cleaning and scrubbing will wait till tomorrow,
For children grow up, as I’ve learned to my sorrow.
So quiet down, cobwebs. Dust go to sleep.
I’m rocking my baby and babies don’t keep.

A Composition by Nan

Letters From a Hill Farm

Song for a Fifth Child was only one part of the life journey of Ruth Hulburt Hamilton. 

Ruth was the mother of four children aged 11,9,7 and 5 when her fifth child, Jane, was born. “The children were all older when Jane was born and they would rush home to see her and hold her. Since there were five years between my next youngest and Jane, I had a bit more quiet time with her.” Ruth recalls.

Ruth’s daughter, Jeremy, remembers well how her mother rocked her and sang with them as children. Some of their favorite songs were The Lake Isle of Innisfree and Dark Brown is the River.

Ruth was born in Kirksville, Missouri in 1921 and she lived most of her life in Oak Park, Illinois. She married when she was 23 and became a mother for the first time at 25. Her poem, Song for a Fifth Child, was published in Ladies Home Journal in 1958 and has found a treasured place in the hearts of mothers for generations.

It honors the everyday efforts of motherhood. It honors the sacred in the mundane and the tensions that pull at us all as mothers. Bills, errands and housework will always be there and yet we must rock while we can.

Poet Ruth Hulburt Hamilton

Obituaries
Ruth Hamilton
Poet, actor, journalist, sparkling wit
July 3, 2018

Ruth Hulburt Hamilton died in Evanston on June 26, 2018. Born in Kirksville, Missouri in 1921, she lived most of her life as a devoted Oak Parker. When she graduated from Oak Park and River Forest High, she decided to study acting. In her year at the Goodman School of Drama she was cast as a thorn bush in Sleeping Beauty. The director criticized her in rehearsal, saying she was not brambling properly. She then attended Pomona College and later graduated with a degree in English Literature from Rosary College (now Dominican University) in River Forest.

In 1943 she married Allen Beye Hamilton. During her long and happy marriage, she wrote poems, several of which were published in the Ladies Home Journal. Her poem, “Song for a Fifth Child,” has been cherished through the decades by generations of mothers.

In addition to raising five children, she had many vocations, acting in community-theater productions, working at Oak Park High, and writing profiles of actors that appeared in the Chicago Daily News and many others newspapers. Her pieces had her signature sparkle, wit, and generosity. She wrote such a charming letter to Lynne Fontanne that the actress, who with her husband Alfred Lunt had long since stopped giving interviews, granted her an audience.

Ruth spent the last 10 years of her life at the Presbyterian Home in Evanston. Among her many gifts was her great capacity for happiness, a gift that touched everyone she met. She will be remembered particularly for her profound joy by her friends; relations; her children Duncan, Bruce, Jeremy, and Jane; her son-in-law Bob Willard; and her grandchildren Allen and Duncan Riddell, and Ben and Hannah Willard. Her daughter Sarah and her husband predeceased her.

---

A Composition by Madelyn Rose Craig

February 11, 2023

I came across this poem while laying on the floor of my kids’ bedroom, waiting for them to fall asleep. Honestly, it couldn’t have found me on a better day. The day before, I had lost my cool every time my kids’ lost theirs. It was a miserable, tear-filled day that I couldn’t wait to end. It was also my “chore day.” This usually lands on a Wednesday unless that Wednesday happens to be a shopping day, in which case chores happen on Thursday. But this week, they happened both days because, well…because we all lost it. It was a day. And I’d had a lot of those.

But then I lay on their floor as I waited for them to fall into a deep sleep. I waited so that I could go do something I wanted to do, have some “me” time to read and write. And then, amid doom-scrolling through Twitter, I found this simple poem.

I love this poem. It is reminiscent of some I have written but with a different voice. It is the voice of someone who has had to say more goodbyes to childhood than I have, someone who has rocked more sleepy babies and laid them down one last time. The words made me laugh, and they sobered me, as I hope they will you. On this same day, I watched a video of my father playing “cars” with my daughter. The video was very in-fashion with my daughter’s personality, and my father played so well with her. It, too, made me laugh and sobered me. Because I don’t have many (any?) memories like that with my grandparents. I hope my children will have many more, memories where we spent time to sing and play and be together.

So, as I finish writing this, I hear my children begin to wake. I will need to make pizza and watch a movie with them because that’s what every other Thursday is for. But between these schedules and chores and things I must do, I will pause to enjoy my time with them. I will cherish these snuggles, color with crayons when asked, and play pretend on the floor. Yes, I’ll get to my writing, those dishes will eventually get done, and maybe one day, I’ll record another video. But first, I’ll tell those pestering to-do’s to hush now so I can hear instead the voices of my babies.

Blessings to you and yours,

Madelyn Rose Craig

D.H. Lawrence - Whales Weep Not!

Baby will not leave mother's side...

Whales Weep Not!

by D.H. Lawrence

They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains
the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.

All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge
on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs.
The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers
there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of
the sea!

And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages
on the depths of the seven seas,
and through the salt they reel with drunk delight
and in the tropics tremble they with love
and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.
Then the great bull lies up against his bride
in the blue deep bed of the sea,
as mountain pressing on mountain, in the zest of life:
and out of the inward roaring of the inner red ocean of whale-blood
the long tip reaches strong, intense, like the maelstrom-tip, and
comes to rest
in the clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she-whale's
fathomless body.

And over the bridge of the whale's strong phallus, linking the
wonder of whales
the burning archangels under the sea keep passing, back and
forth,
keep passing, archangels of bliss
from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim
that wait on whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the
sea
great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies.

And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-
tender young
and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of
the beginning and the end.

And bull-whales gather their women and whale-calves in a ring
when danger threatens, on the surface of the ceaseless flood
and range themselves like great fierce Seraphim facing the threat
encircling their huddled monsters of love.
And all this happens in the sea, in the salt
where God is also love, but without words:
and Aphrodite is the wife of whales
most happy, happy she!

and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin
she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea
she is the female tunny-fish, round and happy among the males
and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea.

Healing songs of Whales & Dolphins

Deep Meditation Music for Harmony of Inner Peace

Meditation & Relaxation - Music channel

David Herbert Richards Lawrence

Poet D.H. Lawrence

(1885–1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialization. Lawrence’s opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile which he called his “savage pilgrimage.” Lawrence is now valued by many as a visionary thinker and significant representative of modernism in English literature. (Annotated biography of D. H. Lawrence courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Summary of Poem

D.H. Lawrence's posthumous 1932 poem “Whales Weep Not!” is an oceanic, mystic lyric from Last Poems that counters the human view of a cold, indifferent sea by portraying whales as warm, passionate embodiments of the life force, divine love, and primal sexuality.

• Hot Blood in a Cold Sea: Lawrence opens by challenging the assumption that the ocean is cold, arguing instead that the deep sea houses the hottest, wildest, and most urgent blood belonging to whales (right whales, sperm whales, hammerheads, and killers).

• Sensual and Divine Mating: The poem shifts into explicit, metaphorical descriptions of whale mating - likening the physical union to mountains pressing against mountains and equating the whales' blowhole spray to an ecstatic release. Lawrence populates this underwater realm with burning archangels and Cherubim passing back and forth across the bridge of their union.

• Nurture and Protection: Enormous mother whales dream while suckling their young with wide-open eyes, while bull-whales encircle their families like fierce Seraphim when danger approaches.

• Aphrodite and Venus: The poem concludes by locating a wordless, divine love in the salt waters, celebrating Aphrodite as the happy wife of whales and Venus transforming into playful dolphins, porpoises, and tunny-fish filled with "dark rainbow bliss".

Literary & Thematic Analysis

• Critique of Modern Rationality: Lawrence rejects mechanical, human-centered worldviews and the cold detachment of modern civilization by projecting raw, vital energy onto the animal kingdom.

• Eros and the Sacred: True to Lawrence's recurring themes (seen in works like Lady Chatterley's Lover), he merges the erotic with the spiritual. Physical passion between whales is not base or profane, but sacred and attended by celestial hierarchies.

• Intertextuality: The poem converses with Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, reframing the whale not as a terrifying or adversarial monster to be conquered, but as an ancient, majestic monarch of natural grace and vitality.

• The Imperative Not to Weep: Commanding whales to "not weep" elevates them into immortal, self-sustaining testaments of existence itself - the beginning and the end of life force in the silent deep.

Photos of Mothers and Babies

Halloween Songs & Poems for Kids

Halloween Songs for Kids

---

Halloween Collection IV

Theme in Yellow

by Carl Sandburg

I spot the hills

With yellow balls in autumn.

I light the prairie cornfields

Orange and tawny gold clusters

And I am called pumpkins.

On the last of October

When dusk is fallen

Children join hands

And circle round me

Singing ghost songs

And love to the harvest moon;

I am a jack-o'-lantern

With terrible teeth

And the children know

I am fooling.

Copyright Credit: Carl Sandburg, "Theme in Yellow"

from Chicago Poems (New York: Henry Holt

and Company, 1916). Public domain.

Some One

by Walter de la Mare

Some one came knocking

At my wee, small door;

Some one came knocking,

I’m sure—sure—sure;

I listened, I opened,

I looked to left and right,

But nought there was a-stirring

In the still dark night;

Only the busy beetle

Tap-tapping on the wall,

Only from the forest

The screech-owl’s call,

Only the cricket whistling

While the dewdrops fall,

So I know not who came knocking,

At all, at all, at all.

All Hallows

by Louise Glück

Even now this landscape is assembling.

The hills darken. The oxen

sleep in their blue yoke,

the fields having been

picked clean, the sheaves

bound evenly and piled at the roadside

among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness

of harvest or pestilence.

And the wife leaning out the window

with her hand extended, as in payment,

and the seeds

distinct, gold, calling

Come here

Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

Macbeth, Act IV, Scene I

[Round about the cauldron go]

by William Shakespeare

The three witches, casting a spell

Round about the cauldron go;   

In the poison’d entrails throw.   

Toad, that under cold stone    

Days and nights hast thirty one   

Swelter’d venom sleeping got,   

Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.   

     Double, double toil and trouble; 

     Fire burn and cauldron bubble.   

Fillet of a fenny snake,   

In the cauldron boil and bake;   

Eye of newt, and toe of frog,   

Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,   

Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,   

Lizard’s leg, and howlet’s wing,   

For a charm of powerful trouble, 

Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.   

     Double, double toil and trouble;   

     Fire burn and cauldron bubble.  

Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,      

Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf     

Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark,     

Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark,     

Liver of blaspheming Jew,      

Gall of goat, and slips of yew     

Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse,     

Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips,     

Finger of birth-strangled babe      

Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,     

Make the gruel thick and slab:     

Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,     

For the ingredients of our cauldron.

     Double, double toil and trouble;   

     Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Mr. Macklin’s Jack O’Lantern

by David McCord

Mr. Macklin takes his knife 

And carves the yellow pumpkin face: 

Three holes bring eyes and nose to life, 

The mouth has thirteen teeth in place. 

Then Mr. Macklin just for fun 

Transfers the corn-cob pipe from his 

Wry mouth to Jack’s, and everyone 

Dies laughing! O what fun it is 

Till Mr. Macklin draws the shade 

And lights the candle in Jack’s skull.

Then all the inside dark is made 

As spooky and as horrorful 

As Halloween, and creepy crawl 

The shadows on the tool-house floor, 

With Jack’s face dancing on the wall. 

O Mr. Macklin! where's the door?

Dusk in Autumn

by Sara Teasdale

The moon is like a scimitar,

A little silver scimitar,

A-drifting down the sky.

And near beside it is a star,

A timid twinkling golden star,

That watches like an eye.

 

And thro’ the nursery window-pane

The witches have a fire again,

Just like the ones we make,—

And now I know they’re having tea,

I wish they’d give a cup to me,

With witches’ currant cake.

The Haunted House

by Felicia Dorothea Hemans

I seem like one

Who treads alone

   Some banquet-hall deserted,

Whose lights are fled,

Whose garlands dead,

   And all but me departed.

           —Thomas Moore, “Oft in the Stilly Night (Scotch Air)”

See’st thou yon gray gleaming hall,

Where the deep elm-shadows fall?

Voices that have left the earth

     Long ago,

Still are murmuring round its hearth,

     Soft and low:

Ever there;—yet one alone

Hath the gift to hear their tone.

Guests come thither, and depart,

Free of step, and light of heart;

Children, with sweet visions blessed,

In the haunted chambers rest;

One alone unslumbering lies

When the night hath sealed all eyes,

One quick heart and watchful ear,

Listening for those whispers clear.

 

See’st thou where the woodbine-flowers

O’er yon low porch hang in showers?

Startling faces of the dead,

     Pale, yet sweet,

One lone woman’s entering tread

     There still meet!

Some with young, smooth foreheads fair,

Faintly shining through bright hair;

Some with reverend locks of snow—

All, all buried long ago!

All, from under deep sea-waves,

Or the flowers of foreign graves,

Or the old and bannered aisle,

Where their high tombs gleam the while;

Rising, wandering, floating by,

Suddenly and silently,

Through their earthly home and place,

But amidst another race.

 

Wherefore, unto one alone,

Are those sounds and visions known?

Wherefore hath that spell of power

     Dark and dread,

On her soul, a baleful dower,

     Thus been shed?

Oh! in those deep-seeing eyes,

No strange gift of mystery lies!

She is lone where once she moved,

Fair, and happy, and beloved!

Sunny smiles were glancing round her,

Tendrils of kind hearts had bound her;

Now those silver chords are broken,

Those bright looks have left no token;

Not one trace on all the earth,

Save her memory of their mirth.

She is lone and lingering now,

Dreams have gathered o’er her brow,

Midst gay songs and children’s play,

She is dwelling far away;

Seeing what none else may see—

Haunted still her place must be!

Copyright Credit: Felicia Dorothea Hemans, “The Haunted House”

from National lyrics, and songs for music.  Dublin: William Curry Jr.

and Company; London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1834. Public domain.

All Hallows’ Eve

by Dorothea Tanning

Be perfect, make it otherwise.

Yesterday is torn in shreds.

Lightning’s thousand sulfur eyes

Rip apart the breathing beds.

Hear bones crack and pulverize.

Doom creeps in on rubber treads.

Countless overwrought housewives,

Minds unraveling like threads,

Try lipstick shades to tranquilize

Fears of age and general dreads.

Sit tight, be perfect, swat the spies,

Don’t take faucets for fountainheads.

Drink tasty antidotes. Otherwise

You and the werewolf: newlyweds.

Copyright Credit: Dorothea Tanning, “All Hallows’ Eve”

from Coming to That. Copyright © 2011 by Dorothea Tanning.

Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press.

Ghost Music

by Robert Graves

Gloomy and bare the organ-loft,

Bent-backed and blind the organist.

From rafters looming shadowy,

From the pipes’ tuneful company,

Drifted together drowsily,

Innumerable, formless, dim,

The ghosts of long-dead melodies,

Of anthems, stately, thunderous,

Of Kyries shrill and tremulous:

In melancholy drowsy-sweet

They huddled there in harmony.

Like bats at noontide rafter-hung.

Copyright © 2016 by Wayne Miller.

Originally published in Poem-a-Day

on October 15, 2016,

by the Academy of American Poets.

All Souls’ Night

by William Butler Yeats

Epilogue to "A Vision"

Midnight has come and the great Christ Church bell
And many a lesser bell sound through the room;

And it is All Souls’ Night.
And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel

Bubble upon the table. A ghost may come;

For it is a ghost’s right,

His element is so fine

Being sharpened by his death,

To drink from the wine-breath

While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.

I need some mind that, if the cannon sound
From every quarter of the world, can stay
Wound in mind’s pondering,
As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound;
Because I have a marvellous thing to say,
A certain marvellous thing
None but the living mock,
Though not for sober ear;
It may be all that hear
Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.

Horton’s the first I call. He loved strange thought

And knew that sweet extremity of pride

That’s called platonic love,

And that to such a pitch of passion wrought

Nothing could bring him, when his lady died,

Anodyne for his love.

Words were but wasted breath;

One dear hope had he:

The inclemency

Of that or the next winter would be death.

Two thoughts were so mixed up I could not tell

Whether of her or God he thought the most,

But think that his mind’s eye,

When upward turned, on one sole image fell;

And that a slight companionable ghost,

Wild with divinity,

Had so lit up the whole

Immense miraculous house

The Bible promised us,

It seemed a gold-fish swimming in a bowl.

On Florence Emery I call the next,

Who finding the first wrinkles on a face

Admired and beautiful,

And by foreknowledge of the future vexed;

Diminished beauty, multiplied commonplace;

Preferred to teach a school

Away from neighbour or friend,

Among dark skins, and there

Permit foul years to wear

Hidden from eyesight to the unnoticed end.

Before that end much had she ravelled out

From a discourse in figurative speech

By some learned Indian

On the soul’s journey. How it is whirled about

Wherever the orbit of the moon can reach,

Until it plunge into the sun;

And there, free and yet fast,

Being both Chance and Choice,

Forget its broken toys

And sink into its own delight at last.

I call MacGregor Mathers from his grave,

For in my first hard spring-time we were friends,

Although of late estranged.

I thought him half a lunatic, half knave,

And told him so, but friendship never ends;

And what if mind seem changed,

And it seem changed with the mind,

When thoughts rise up unbid

On generous things that he did

And I grow half contented to be blind!

He had much industry at setting out,

Much boisterous courage, before loneliness

Had driven him crazed;

For meditations upon unknown thought

Make human intercourse grow less and less;

They are neither paid nor praised.

But he’d object to the host,

The glass because my glass;

A ghost-lover he was

And may have grown more arrogant being a ghost.

But names are nothing. What matter who it be,

So that his elements have grown so fine

The fume of muscatel

Can give his sharpened palate ecstasy

No living man can drink from the whole wine.

I have mummy truths to tell

Whereat the living mock,

Though not for sober ear,

For maybe all that hear

Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.

Such thought—such thought have I that hold it tight

Till meditation master all its parts,

Nothing can stay my glance

Until that glance run in the world’s despite

To where the damned have howled away their hearts,

And where the blessed dance;

Such thought, that in it bound

I need no other thing,

Wound in mind’s wandering

As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound.

Copyright Credit: William Butler Yeats, “All Souls’ Night”

from Seven Poems and a Fragment.

Dundrum: The Cuala Press, 1922. Public domain.

"Top 25 Scary Poems of All Time"

Gathered by Michael R. Burch

The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes
Tom O'Bedlam's Song by Anonymous
A Lyke-Wake Dirge by Anonymous
The Raven, Ulalume, Alone and Lenore by Edgar Allan Poe
Ophélie (“Ophelia”) and Antico (“Ancient”) by Arthur Rimbaud
"Song of the Witches" from Macbeth by William Shakespeare
The Bustle in a House and Because I Could Not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson
The Stolen Child by William Butler Yeats
The Broken Tower by Hart Crane
Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Allayne by Kevin N. Roberts
The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens
A Last Word by Ernest Dowson
La Belle Dame sans Merci by John Keats
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Listeners by Walter de la Mare
Luke Havergal and The Mill by Edward Arlington Robinson
The Unreturning by Wilfred Owen
Her Kind by Anne Sexton and Daddy by Sylvia Plath (a tie between friends)
The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy
The Vampire by Conrad Aiken
The Fisher by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Du by Janet Kenny
Part 6 from The Dark Side of the Deity: Interlude by Joe M. Ruggier
Haunted Houses by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Poems by Anne Carson

Poet Anne Carson

Father's Old Blue Cardigan

by Anne Carson

Now it hangs on the back of the kitchen chair

where I always sit, as it did

on the back of the kitchen chair where he always sat.

I put it on whenever I come in,

as he did, stamping

the snow from his boots.

I put it on and sit in the dark.

He would not have done this.

Coldness comes paring down from the moonbone in the sky.

His laws were a secret.

But I remember the moment at which I knew

he was going mad inside his laws.

He was standing at the turn of the driveway when I arrived.

He had on the blue cardigan with the buttons done up all the way to the top.

Not only because it was a hot July afternoon

but the look on his face --

as a small child who has been dressed by some aunt early in the morning

for a long trip

on cold trains and windy platforms

will sit very straight at the edge of his seat

while the shadows like long fingers

over the haystacks that sweep past

keep shocking him

because he is riding backwards.

Copyright © 2000 by Anne Carson

O Small Sad Ecstasy of Love

by Anne Carson

I like being with you all night with closed eyes.

What luck—here you are

coming

along the stars!

I did a road trip

all over my mind and heart

and

there you were

kneeling by the roadside

with your little toolkit

fixing something.

Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.

Copyright © 2020 by Anne Carson.

Originally published in Poem-a-Day

on December 10, 2020,

by the Academy of American Poets

Apostle Town

by Anne Carson

After your death.

It was windy every day.

Every day.

Opposed us like a wall.

We went.

Shouting sideways at one another.

Along the road.

It was useless.

The spaces between us.

Got hard.

They are empty spaces.

And yet they are solid.

And black and grievous.

As gaps between the teeth.

Of an old woman.

You knew years ago.

When she was.

Beautiful the nerves pouring around in her like palace fire.

Anne Carson Saturday

October 15, 2016

Anne Carson Bio

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq4g1j54nepyo

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/anne-carson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Carson

Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, and classicist known for blending ancient mythology with modern forms. Her most popular poems, verse novels, and lyric collections include:

Major Verse Novels and Long Poems

Autobiography of Red (1998): A celebrated novel in verse that retells the fragmentary myth of Geryon and Heracles by Stesichorus, reimagining the winged monster as a modern gay teenager.

The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (2001): A narrative poem in 29 sections exploring the anatomy of a failed marriage, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize. 

The Glass Essay (1995): A long, semi-autobiographical lyric poem from Plainwater that confronts grief, a broken relationship, and the haunting presence of Emily Brontë on a northern moor.

Standout Short Poems and Lyrical Works

"Father's Old Blue Cardigan": A poignant, sharply observed reflection on her father's memory and mental decline.

"O Small Sad Ecstasy of Love": A compact, striking lyric on the fragile and disorienting nature of falling in love.

"Apostle Town": Opening with the famous lines, "After your death. It was windy every day. Every day. Opposed us like a wall".

Glass, Irony, and God (1992): A collection containing seminal short talks and verse pieces that established her distinct voice.

Other poems. Listed on PoemHunter.com