THE HOPPER POETRY PRIZE
OCTOBER 2020We are pleased to announce that David Crews has received honorable mention for The Hopper Poetry Prize for his manuscript Incantation.
Evocative of Eryn Green, Wallace Stevens, and new American pastoral, this manuscript unspools deliciously over four long sequences that flex between poetry and drama, holding this particular sociocultural moment with a thrill of the Romantic sublime crossed with Modernist doubt. The length of the pieces match well to the short and/or shifting lines, and the eclectic source material generates a lovely tapestry for this world. Beautiful manuscript—evocative in large part due to its precise naturalist detail but also because of what these details are allowed to reverberate into and evoke. Inspiring.
—The Hopper Editors
David Crews (he/him) is author of Wander-Thrush: Lyric Essays of the Adirondacks (Ra Press, 2018) and High Peaks (Ra Press, 2015)—a poetry collection that catalogs his hiking of the Adirondack 46ers. He serves as resident artist with ARTS By The People, as well as a contributing writer for Northeast Wilderness Trust. His website is davidcrewspoetry.com. Enjoy a poem from Incantation below.
To dream, swim
She remembers
swimming, and the sea
was beside her
with a door where
when opened
ocean creatures could make their way
in, they came the orcas
circling around her calm, quiet
like a current they moved slowly
as if dancing
heart beat flutter to breath inside the chest
and she did not touch them
and they did not touch her
narwhals are dying
you know, songs in the ice
their tusks a myth