Description
The Art of Mercy: New and Selected Poems by Robert L. Penick
Robert L. Penick’s short, masterful poems have been showing up in small press magazines since the early 1990s. The Art of Mercy, his first full-length collection, contains excerpts from four chapbooks as well as fifty-seven new and previously uncollected poems, representing the best of a long, quiet career in the poetry trenches.
“Penick is gritty. Like the photographer who finds beauty in abandoned houses and cracked surfaces, his work makes the reader appreciate the sweat, dust, and failure we brush against, then turn our minds from. He is the tour guide of the ignored. He demands a broadening of our humanity and he does so with hope, precision, and humility.
– Cliff Wieck, author of Hagiography and Bestiary
Sample poems from “The Art of Mercy”
The End of June
The old man at the corner bus stop –
there without fail each morning at eight –
disappeared either two weeks or six months ago.
I’m not sure which.
Was 1987 the year I dated the girl
with the long auburn hair?
Perhaps it was 1986.
I was at the university, I know.
I remember the mole on her back
but not her birthday or eye color.
Things move away more quickly now
and fewer things take their place.
I walk around this city, peering
into faces empty and bloated
like drowning victims.
Last night I saw a bird fall
from a wire, wings unmoving
before it hit the street.
Cleaning
I’m dropping empty cat food cans
into the recycling bin.
There have been a dozen of them
sitting on the kitchen counter
for weeks. The house stinks of them.
I take the garbage outside,
remove your clothes from the dryer,
fold them up and put them on
the dresser. When I wash the dishes
I handle each piece gingerly,
trying not to wake you.
Later I will fill up a basket
with the dirty clothes I find
on the floor. This is not my house
and you are an adult.
We are becoming something other
than lovers.
“The End of June” and “Cleaning” first appeared in Shō No. 2, 2003
This book was produced in partnership with Hohm Press as part of a “Beggar Poet Series,” which has since been discontinued. It is available for purchase from the Shō Poetry Journal shop for the special price of $14.