Conversations with Death

poems by

Douglas K Currier

~140 pages, $17 (+ shipping)

Projected Release Date: April/May 2025

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Douglas K Currier is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh MFA program. His poetry collections are: Señorita Death (2022) and Death Studies (2023), in English, with Main Street Rag Publishing Company. His collections: Vida Prestada (2021) with Milena Caserola in Buenos Aires, and Regreso (2022) with Moglia Ediciones are both in Spanish. Exogénesis (2023) is bilingual with artwork by Marcos Kura, with Moglia Ediciones in Corrientes, Argentina. Currier has published poetry and fiction in various journals and anthologies in North and South America. He divides his time between Vermont and Argentina.

The business of a poet includes the exploration and examination of the human condition. Currier follows through on these in his earlier works and continues it in his most recent. Conversations with Death. Conversations examines death’s role in our daily lives from several angles, but its greatest contribution is in the fourth section, “The Marty Suite” in which the generalizing about death is now seen in relation to one visit by Death.  ~Jeremiah K Durick

In Conversations with Death Douglas Currier uses his strong command of poetic craft and controlled intelligence to help readers explore the sharp facets of death and her “…obscure and gentle mercies.” In each poem he uses sensual images to evoke meaning. His language is clear, direct and purposeful; never overstated or exaggerated. There is no ranting or cajoling. Currier wants readers to consider death at a slant, consider a slightly changed possibility of the inevitable. – Michael Carrino, author of Natural Light, Conestoga Zen 3 and By Available Light-New and Selected Poems

Abyss

Death is the abyss we’re not supposed to stare into too long,
lest she look back into each of us, take our measure
– how much pain, how much heartache, how much
illusion, how much memory we can carry and for how long.

We wear that measure on our faces, in our eyes, and it is
impossible not to look – Lot’s poor wife, the lost Perseus
in each of us. For even just a glance, we’re willing to pay
everything, anything. Any mirror turns us to salt, to stone.

Surprise

I wish not
to be surprised
by death.

Is a call too much
to ask, a text, a tap
on the shoulder,
an unexpected caress,
some small sign
I’m wanted elsewhere?

The weariness I feel
may be enough.

Aging out

To get born your body makes a pact with death
and from that moment all it tries to do is cheat

~“A Slip of Paper” Louise Gluck

So, there are battle scars, marks gotten
in the flight and struggle, skin shed
from being too close to life and its living.

If the pact with death included aging out,
it was a bad deal, and the body is right
to resent its losses and additions, these marks,

this bruised fruit, the battered baggage bodies
become with too much time. Even with care
that comes too late, they only last so long

and not without payment in pain and dignity.
I’ve chased youth to fatigue, held out – sure,
call it cheating – to trade comfort

for a few more wakings, a few random
thoughts, a few acts of kindness and revenge.

Voices

La muerte me pertenece, vive en la frontera, tan cerca de la vida, tan
cerca de la pasión, y no es una metáfora.

~“La mala y la buena muerte” G. Elizabeth Bergallo

The voices are loud tonight. Sleep
is a metaphor for death, desire another,
beauty, dream, and memory – poor
dying thing that it is — yet another.

They are female voices – murmuring,
shushing, whispering, chiding, sighing,
complaining of extravagance and waste.

And falling to sleep – nothing if not an act
of faith, a belief in waking like any other
morning, a belief that one will be close
to where one abandoned oneself and not
a totally different person in a different place
with foreign dreams in a foreign tongue.

All is metaphor, the whole damn thing.