“The Things of This World” poetry by Michael David Blanchard

In his recent collection, The Things of This World (Kelsay Books 2026), poet and professor Michael David Blanchard tasks his poems with finding a reckoning, thereby inviting readers toward a parallel accounting. Anchored by this theme of moral inventory, the collection showcases Blanchard’s deep appreciation for the art of poetry and his talent for shaping it. These reflective works blend the personal with the intellectual, using nature, mythology, history, philosophy, and literature as a framework. Through precise technical control, Blanchard constructs free verse rich in sensory imagery, discovery, and an exacting, immersive depth. While rooted in Southern sensibilities, the poems transcend geography while conjuring landscapes both physical and emotional—from the “Big Muddy” to “the house that no longer stands.”

Through the alchemy of words and empathy, Blanchard invites us into poems sustained by the tension between loss and love, thought and feeling, what was and what could be. At the heart of these evocative pieces lies his quiet truth, captured in lines from the opening title poem:

The true reckoning

of this world

 

is the way we come

to know things twice

 

in the wonder first

and then the remembering

 

the bitterroot blossom

before it fades

 

and everything else we lose

but love anyway.

Opening his collection with the poem “The Things of This World” foretells the graceful, controlled, and resonant poems that follow. It is also one of his more lyrical poems, with phrases both metrical and alliterative—”bitterroot blossom,” “nuthatch nesting,” “willow reaching.” Readers can hear music in those lines just as they can see the beauty of the natural images and feel the pang that comes with the closing lines on loss and love. Moreover, the poem’s explicit reference to a reckoning introduces a core theme that echoes throughout the collection.

While it is risky to assume a poem is autobiographical, there are works in The Things of This World that convey a sense of memoir, gentle at the edges yet precise and sharp in the details. For instance, in “The Beginning of All Things,” Blanchard writes of the night his father died:

our father, who is

in heaven I hope,

waited in death

as in life to see things

through until the end

settle the book

on all accounts

then close the cover

That account book referenced in the opening two stanzas is “written in a language / foreign as forgiveness,” a language that needs “translation / into the vernacular / of trespass and deliverance.” Once more, the poem calls for a reckoning, though with the images and not the actual word.

In “Slow Burn,” another reflective poem with the quality of a memoir, he writes of a camping trip in late summer where his words on a dying relationship capture “a vague vulnerability / primal as fear.” Showing his talent for using the ordinary to mean much more than the literal, he speaks “of cold coffee and campfire ashes” and, too, of “waking up with you / in the same tent / cocooned in our separate bags.” The reckoning in this poem recognizes “we were / no longer the flame / and could never be the phoenix.”

Landscapes and nature, used lushly and effectively, are a recurring and central part of these poems, creating both warmth and beauty while also working metaphorically. In “Crossing at Carthage,” one of the most powerful of the poems in this collection, Blanchard uses natural scenes to create additional unifying themes in these poems—a search for place and meaning, or perhaps a yearning for reconciliation. In the poem, the narrator crosses the Spring River at Carthage, Missouri, once the site of a bloody battle in the War Between the States. Though he crossed “for better fishing,” he finds:

On the river’s far bank

a cottonfield gone to seed

among bramble and wild berries

black as the snakes

that rule the ground.

 

And on this side

to which we have crossed

a canebrake thick with bamboo

mimosa and memories

of a place old as home

Yet that is not all the poet finds on that far bank. After reflecting on the tragedies of the Civil War when “bodies bloated the water,” the narrator approaches yet another kind of reckoning, this time with more intimacy:

…borne by better angels

until the gravity of my own

 

civil war of contradictions

brings me back down

to the defensible high ground

and the vulnerable valley

whose flank is unprotected

 

from sorties of infidelity

and doubt, jealousy and rage

promises made and pledges forgotten

and questions unanswered in the battle

between love and disdain

In yet another captivating and dramatic poem titled “Wild Boar,” the imagery carries a strong, even visceral, punch similar in impact to the blend of beauty and brutality in Galway Kinnell’s “The Bear.” And as with “The Bear,” Blanchard elicits the five senses (perhaps even a sixth with the spiritual). After noting the “savage spirit” of the boar, the poem evokes the smell and taste of a feast with its “Argentine malbec” and “roasted loin of wild boar / — made tender by rosemary / lemon juice and slow mesquite / — wild rice with dark gravy / apricot sauce and grilled asparagus.”  Equally compelling are the lines capturing the sights and visual images with phrases like “glistening the grass as we returned / with bright blood and black bristle….” Sound, too, is rendered vividly with these words: “a shot through the lung then the loud exhalation / like a car tire going flat all at once.”  Nor does Blanchard ignore the sense of touch in bringing to life the scene as he describes with “the task / of dragging dead weight almost equal my own / back to the truck with double yoke / one harnessed to forelegs / and one to my shoulders.”

While the atmospheric quality of the poem is certainly haunting, the ending stanza returns to that quest for a reckoning or reconciliation—or perhaps just an understanding.

And we come to this table from taking pause

at all things on earth and in heaven

which fashioned with savage grace in me

the beast that hungers for succulent flesh

of wild things, the man that thirsts to kill them,

and the god condemned for all days to be bound

to a body and drag it through

the broad brush and dry season of mortality

Blanchard’s poetry, too, has a spiritual quality, which as fellow poet Michael Hettich writes “opens our eyes and hearts to profound mysteries of being.” For example, in “The Theory of Everything,” “we cannot in the end / know the mind of God / except to know that the mind of God / is never made up /of finalities.” Even in these more spiritual poems, nature retains its prominence. In “Second Comings,” the last poem in the collection, a boy waits in “those thunderous nights” for “the coming again / of Christ / both awaited and feared.” Yet images such as the “rolling clouds,” which are described as if “painted / by Caravaggio,” lead to the conclusion that we must look for God:

…in the single doe

that emerged this morning

from scattered pieces of calm

 

stepping cautiously back into the world

along the gravel road then darting

disappearing into tall prairie grass

high as the mane on a prize pony

The Things of This World is a deep and meaningful collection of poems, which, as Hettich says, might open “our eyes and hearts to profound mysteries of being” and might well also gently prod us toward our own reckonings. Blanchard’s confident poems should leave readers with the quiet conviction that our deepest reckonings are found not in grand revelations but in sustained attention to the things of this world.

Michael David Blanchard

Michael Blanchard is a native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and he now lives in the Cadron Valley of Arkansas, where he is an adjunct professor of literature at the University of Central Arkansas. In addition to his teaching duties, he serves as editor of SLANT, the University’s international journal of contemporary poetry, and is an active member of the Poets’ Roundtable of Arkansas. He has also taught at Troy State University, University of Louisiana, and North Carolina State University. Previous publications include four books of poetry, including The Pearl Diver’s Daughter & Other Poems (2023). He also spent two decades as an advocate for compassionate care for the sick and dying through his work with hospice organizations in Louisiana and North Carolina.”

“Crossing at Carthage”

By Michael David Blanchard

 

(This poem appears in its entirety with permission from the author.)

 

At Carthage following the flood

the boatman kills his motor

some thirty feet from shore

and we glide the final distance

to the dock for better fishing

 

On the river’s far bank

a cottonfield gone to seed

among bramble and wild berries

black as the snakes

that rule the ground

 

And on this side

to which we have crossed

a canebrake thick with bamboo

mimosa and memories

of a place old as home

 

These banks were once

encampments of opposing armies

the boatman says

whose bodies bloated the water

and whose blood turned it red

 

As if the river were not a god

I imagined in turn but a lamb

sacrificed on the altar

of the sword to settle

a question of human freedom

 

Bowline in hand I leap forward

unmoored for a moment

to either land or water

but borne by better angels

until the gravity of my own

 

civil war of contradictions

brings me back down

to the defensible high ground

and the vulnerable valley

whose flank is unprotected

 

from sorties of infidelity

and doubt, jealousy and rage

promises made and pledges forgotten

and questions unanswered in the battle

between love and disdain

 

From this side to which we have crossed

we cast hope into our shadow selves

for channel cats and river bass

at Carthage after the flood

where fishing is better the boatman says