The Marriage of the Moon and the Field by Sunni Wilkinson

Sunni Wilkinson’s The Marriage of the Moon and the Field is filled with human, intimate, understanding poems. In works populated by mythological subjects, historical figures, family members, and people from the news, you are pulled into a space where you can rest with them and talk—a series of situations and people and even inanimate objects taken for who they are, looked at deeply and equally. I read these poems with a smile, they were filled with people I don’t know but love. Good poetry strives toward the universal in the personal. Wilkinson does this expertly. Buy here.

From “Nesting Dolls”

The biggest one carries all that weight

inside her it’s a wonder

she doesn’t fall over.

Pull apart her two halves and out

comes another, rouged and ready

to open again. Quiet, and you can hear them

breathe, a tiny ocean

sound in each. Just now a thump

under my ribs says No more room

in this borrowed house. Like cells slowly dividing,

we make our peace by letting go. . .

From “At Last the Light in the Trees Wavers”

and moves on like an old woman

turning away

from the mirror. Everything dims.

Now the lamp

is master. November,

and the rake face–

down in a pile of leaves

is like a kid playing dead,

the stick of his back staying

perfectly still.

And at night in our bed

the bird of me returns

to the tree of you. . .