Poetry by Charles Weld

About the
author.

Charles Weld’s poems have been previously collected in two chapbooks, Country I Would Settle In (Pudding House, 2004) and Who Cooks For You? (Kattywompus Press, 2012). A mental health counselor educated at Cornell and the University of Maine, he’s worked as an administrator for a non-profit agency that provides mental health services to youth and families. Mostly retired, he enjoys walking in the Adirondacks, step-grandparenthood, the deep roots of a long marriage, listening to children, the overlapping circles of blended and extended family, Quaker community, chopping wood, carrying water, and the pace of life in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York.

Portfolio

Who Cooks
for You?

In his birdsong-filled collection, Charles Weld walks that edge where narrative opens through the mysterious speech of the world, in the voice of Great Horned Owl, Common Yellowthroat, White-throated Sparrow and their kin, with glimpses along the way of a human geneology unspooling into a father’s sometimes eccentric education of his sons. The poet son brings his resultant razor senses to parse for us both the natural world in which he came of age, and the stranger makings of men: the teachings of Buddhists, the Bible’s narrative, the privatization of poetry, and history itself.

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Seringo

Seringo is an inventive sonnet series that builds completely original compositions around particularly rich quotes from Thoreau's writing in much the same spirit that ekphrastic poets let paintings inspire totally individual narratives. This ambitious system would be disastrous if attempted by a less imaginative or informed mind, but every one of these poems delights with old country idioms, anecdotes and aphorisms numinous with an observant negative capability beyond scientific details of umvelden without rejecting them. As sonnets, the cadence is profound with a light touch and the rhyming is impressively masterful.

-William Hathaway, author of Dawn Chorus, The Right No, Sightseer, Promeneur Solitaire, Churlsgrace, Looking into the Heart of Light, The Gymnast of Inertia, A Wilderness of Monkeys and Fish, Flesh, & Fowl

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Reviews

Charlie Weld's poems capture the best of Thoreau's journal-the steady, meditative observation of the natural world until facts burst into insight, wisdom, and music. Weld uses language from Thoreau's journals and letters, as well as words from other naturalists, the way a birdwatcher uses optics: to sharpen and discipline the eye, to better see what's there, "to observe reality / without all the particulars being blurred." He uses verse-a loose sonnet form that snaps into rhyme the way binoculars lock onto a tuft of feathers in the canopy-to illuminate those moments when "chronology's scaffold falls away," and long study, deeply personal memory, and meticulous observation merge into one. These poems pull you in and take your breath away.

-John J. Kucich, editor of Rediscovering the Maine Woods: Thoreau's Legacy in an Unsettled Land and author of Ghostly Communion: Cross-Cultural Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

If you want to engage with Henry Thoreau, reading his books and essays is the first thing to do. Then a biography or two. But another excellent way is to read Charles Weld's sonnets. Did you know that the odds of dying of TB in Concord in Thoreau's day were one in seven-which are the same odds for acorn potency, something that Thoreau calculated? After reading Weld's poems you will know many things you didn't before-about nature, about 19th-century life, and about how to live-Thoreau's great question, and Weld's as well. With Weld you also get the pleasure of his distinctive skill with the sonnet. Solid, well-made, these poems have flavor, intelligence, wisdom. By all means read them aloud.

-Howard Nelson, author of That Was Really Something, All the Earthly Lovers, The Nap by the Waterfall, Bone Music, Singing into the Belly, and Creatures