Soulard Poems - C. Berry

Written primarily during Berry’s time living in the St. Louis neighborhood of Soulard, these poems gesture toward questions that remain, peacefully, just beyond the poet’s reach. They come from life in the city — a new life in a little apartment with beets and carrots growing out back, a sweat-bee keeping company. Soulard Poems is a walk and smoke and thought in the early morning. 

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“These are poems I will return to again and again, as I do the poems of Tomas Transtromer or Yehuda Amichai. They evidence a being fully present – alive to a world both light and dark, a world of sky and trees, as ordinary as beetles in the basement or last call at the bar. Reading them, one feels how brave and wondrous it can be to live even a single day. Each poem manifests a humble philosophy of its moment with a clarity experienced rather than held, and not so much spoken as ‘sounded out.’ Berry writes, ‘There is an explosion and a song / in almost everything.’ Even as the speaker of the poems acknowledges the ghosts that are his familiars, we understand how unconditional are the clarity and the joy.”
    
-Paula Closson Buck, author of You Cannot Shoot a Poem and Litanies Near Water

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C. Berry holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His writing has appeared in such places as 3Elements Review, Open Minds Quarterly, Past Ten, West Branch Wired, The Writer’s Chronicle and elsewhere. The choral work Love, by Dr. William Payn, features a poem by Berry as lyrics to the piece “When All is Full.” Raised in the Midwest, Berry now lives with his fiancée in North Carolina.