New Milford Public Library will hold its next poetry book club led by the town’s poet laureate, James Scrimgeour, Feb. 22.
The club will meet the third Thursday of each month at 6 p.m. at the Main Street library.
Future sessions will be held Feb. 22 (Sharon Olds) and March 22 (William Butler Yeats).
Scrimgeour is a New Milford resident and professor emeritus of English at Western Connecticut State University.
Participants pick up a packet of poems for the meeting during the first week of each month.
For more information, call 860-355-1191, ext. 201 or by visit www.newmilfordlibrary.org.
Registration is preferred.
Below is a the poem “The Death of Marilyn Monroe by Sharon Olds:
The ambulance men touched her cold
body, lifted it, heavy as iron,
onto the stretcher, tried to close the
mouth, closed the eyes, tied the
arms to the sides, moved a caught
strand of hair, as if it mattered,
saw the shape of her breasts, flattened by
gravity, under the sheet
carried her, as if it were she,
down the steps.
These men were never the same. They went out
afterwards, as they always did,
for a drink or two, but they could not meet
each other’s eyes.
Their lives took
a turn-one had nightmares, strange
pains, impotence, depression. One did not
like his work, his wife looked
different, his kids. Even death
seemed different to him-a place where she
would be waiting,
and one found himself standing at night
in the doorway to a room of sleep, listening to a
woman breathing, just an ordinary
woman
breathing.