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Albatross – 2010

Number 21

Spring 2010

Renee Emerson

This slim issue moves its poetry seamlessly from religion to nature to philosophy. Albatross is a small, chapbook-like magazine, stapled together in the center, featuring only poetry. On the inside of the front cover is a quote from Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

This slim issue moves its poetry seamlessly from religion to nature to philosophy. Albatross is a small, chapbook-like magazine, stapled together in the center, featuring only poetry. On the inside of the front cover is a quote from Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

God Save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends that plague thee thus! –
Why lookst thou so? –With my crossbow
I shot the albatross…”

which continues to the back cover of the magazine, with

And I had done a hellish thing
And it would work ‘em woe:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Ah wretch! Said they, the bird to slay
That made the breeze to blow!

The opening poem is by Don Thompson, “God hath chosen the weak things of the world,” which evokes a tone of barrenness, introducing a world “where nothing ever takes root.” This barrenness ties in later to the end of the magazine, where poems such as “rome” by Rob Talbert again address the issue, this time as “the wearing of things.”

The majority of poems are free verse and demonstrate a certain density of language, heavy with assonance and consonance, descriptive and lush. Though the magazine is only a short twenty-six pages, the poems collaborate and hark back to one another, creating a unified work.
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