Back to Article
The Mountain Eagle

NEWS

Word Thursdays Featuring VP Loggins

By Matthew Avitabile · May 4, 2021 · The Mountain Eagle
Bright Hill Press announces the winner of its full-length poetry competition, V.P. Loggins of Annapolis, Maryland, for his collection, The Wild Severance.
Bright Hill and Loggins will launch the new book with a featured, virtual reading on May 13 at Word Thursdays, BHP's reading series in its 29th year. Loggins's reading and question-and-answer session with editor Bertha Rogers and executive director Beatrice Georgalidis will take place after the Open Mic, which begins at 7 pm and hosts five poets and writers briefly reading from their own work.
To attend the virtual event on May 13, please click this link just before 7 PM: 
RSVP to the event on Facebook here.
Or visit the event on our website here.
Suggested donation is $3, and free to students. Donations to Bright Hill are gratefully accepted via Paypal with the email wordthur@stny.rr.com, with a credit card by visiting brighthillpress.org or by check, made out to Bright Hill Press Inc, and mailed to 94 Church Street, Treadwell, NY 13846, or by credit card by personal appointment by emailing info@brighthillpress.org.
Virtual "donation jar:"

FEATURED WRITER
V. P. Loggins (Annapolis, Maryland) is the author of The Green Cup (2017), winner of the Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize, The Fourth Paradise (Main Street Rag 2010) and Heaven Changes (Pudding House Chapbook Series 2007). He has published one book of criticism on Shakespeare, The Life of Our Design, and is co-author of another, Shakespeare’s Deliberate Art. His poems have appeared in The Baltimore Review, First Things, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Healing Muse, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Poetry Ireland Review, The Southern Review and Tampa Review, among others. He has been a finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the May Swenson Award, and the Tampa Review Prize. Talking Drums, an art exhibition and installation by sculptor and ceramicist Andrew Cooke, music by Paddy Craig, based on poems in The Fourth Paradise, appeared in Portaferry, Northern Ireland. His work has been featured in A Universe of Dreams, poetry and music performed nationally by Neal Conan of National Public Radio and Ensemble Galilei. Born in Birmingham, Alabama and raised in Illinois, V. P. Loggins holds a Ph.D. in English Renaissance literature from Purdue University and has taught most recently at the United States Naval Academy.
THE WINNER OF BRIGHT HILL'S FULL-LENGTH POETRY COMPETITION, THE WILD SEVERANCE, AVAILABLE NOW FOR PURCHASE
The Wild Severance contains six poems that serve as a prologue and an epilogue and introduce each of the book’s four sections. They form a loose narrative depicting a deadly encounter between a hawk and a crow and stand as an extended metaphor
exploring the difficulties of living a complex human life—loss, loneliness, desperation, joy, sorrow, love. As the poem “O” observes, ‘The hawk bows to the breast of the crow / with the abandon of a lover. Beak for teeth / tearing away at the heart’s cover.’ The book opens with a poem entitled “Orison,” which calls into consciousness its central symbol of brutality, the hawk, and is followed by “Crow,” which introduces the book’s first section and initiates an exploration of the dark dualities of predator and prey, perpetrator and victim, guilt and innocence, fear and fearlessness, terror and assurance. The Wild Severance concludes with “Hawk and Crow,” which begins ‘When morning returns’ and ends with ‘prayer.’ This book takes its reader, therefore, on an undulating flight through darkness to light.
   "The Wild Severance delivers on its title. Pelicans, crows, gulls, fireflies, robins, cardinals, blue jays fly from its pages messaging time, illuminating our lives 'in the falling darkness.' But it's not only the animal world this poet loves: he writes of literary and mythological figures, elevating them to existence with language. There are people to remember, too: 'where a second child fits; how coffee brings a mother and father back from memory; present-day family encounters,' while I watch from my chair I see five generations. This is a book rich with what is true and what lasts; V. P. Loggins makes us believe there's sanctity enough in this cold world."—Grace Cavalieri.

"With his newest collection of poems, The Wild Severance, V. P. Loggins startles us like crows taking flight after a gunshot. This book wraps around the human heart in all of its moods, reflecting the melancholy of late in the day, when 'The sky beyond is changing violet,' the unease of 'night / when the moon is burning,' and the hope that comes when 'light / outside the window hardens / the black morning into blue.' The poetry here is astonishing. Light spreads throughout these poems like sunrise through opened curtains. They are written with the meticulous and patient gaze of a bird watcher."—Stephen Roger Powers
PURCHASE
THE WILD SEVERANCE
AT OUR ONLINE BOOKSTORE