Elizabeth Spires

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Elizabeth Spires


Born
in Lancaster, Ohio, The United States
January 01, 1952

Genre


Elizabeth Spires is the author of five collections of poetry as well as several books for children. She has been the recipient a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1998 she received the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Maryland Author Award from the Maryland Library Association. Her poems have been featured on National Public Radio and have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The New Criterion, and in many anthologies, including Contemporary American Poetry (7th edition) and The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. She lives in Baltimore ...more

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I Am Arachne: Fifteen Greek...

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Now the Green Blade Rises: ...

4.35 avg rating — 26 ratings — published 2002 — 4 editions
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Worldling

3.50 avg rating — 24 ratings — published 1992 — 5 editions
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Globe

really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 11 ratings — published 1981 — 3 editions
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More books by Elizabeth Spires…
Quotes by Elizabeth Spires  (?)
Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads. (Learn more)

“A King Who Keeps To Himself Dwells"

A king who keeps to himself dwells
in a humble house with his sole servant.
While his body-man eats, drinks, feels fever
and chills, and plucks gray hairs from his head,
his master knows nothing of thirst or hunger,
illness or age. They set out together, but whether
fortune or misfortune awaits them on the world’s
wide road depends on the servant’s whim, faithful
or unfaithful to his king. Along the way, a kinswoman,
mother and sister to them both, offers them a room,
a mean, but the soon press on, until the old servant
can go no farther. He stumbles, falls, and cannot
rise again. Then the king, without a glance backward,
continues on to a country we shall all come to know.
Whoever knows this pair, say their names.

(and the answer is body and soul)”
Elizabeth Spires

“I shall say a prayer to the Moon
because even a badger prays now and then:

O Silver Sliver,
shine down on me and change me
so that I am what I am,
not two things, no not two!

But the Moon never answers.
It grows smaller as it ascends,
as if someone or something were eating it.
I understand such hunger.”
Elizabeth Spires, I Am Arachne: Fifteen Greek and Roman Myths



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