Tipton Poetry Journal – Spring 2010

Tipton Poetry Journal is a small, stapled, chapbook-like (in appearance) publication featuring “poetry from Indiana and around the world.” This issue’s 44 pages include the work of three-dozen poets. While I was not familiar with these poets, all have substantial publication credits in a wide variety of journals and several have authored full-length collections and/or novels.

Tipton Poetry Journal is a small, stapled, chapbook-like (in appearance) publication featuring “poetry from Indiana and around the world.” This issue’s 44 pages include the work of three-dozen poets. While I was not familiar with these poets, all have substantial publication credits in a wide variety of journals and several have authored full-length collections and/or novels.

A poem by James Murdock, “Leaving the Present Tents,” accompanied by a watercolor/pencil painting by Laura Hall Tesdahl, “inspired by the poem” and exhibited in a show of artist/poet collaborations at a gallery in Indiana, is reflective of the journals’ editorial predilections:

Walking
In a canopy of green,

I rubbed my eyes,
Then stepped into
The silent sea
Of stars;
The stars, the stars!
A million puffs
Of cottonwood
Reflecting on the river.
My soul
Cast off its clothes
And plunged into the Milky Way
Forever.

As the editors announce in notes that accompany the TOC, there are a number of poems celebrating the glories of spring, including “Singing with the Pleiades” by John D. Groppe and Katie Clare’s “In Situ”(“Bleeding heart and ferns in the ground now; grey sky above. / You run in circles, fits of laughter, chasing the air, falling to the ground.”) Spring is not without its link to the world beyond the seasons, too. Politics and nature come together in Lily Iona MacKenzie’s “Warm April” (We sip / Italian / white in / our garden, discuss / Obama, McCain, the Clintons”).

Family narratives in verse are also featured, including Will Greenway’s “Fables” and Ruth Holzer’s “The Talking Cure” (“Last night, I called my brother on the Coast, / after hearing about the diagnosis.”) The issue also includes several short book reviews, accompanied by color photographs of book covers and their authors.
[tiptonpoetryjournal.com/]