Broken Prose, Spoken Poems
these lean fowl fly
beneath clear heavens
in the lavender evening.
Saintly over a smooth waveless surface
as ancient ships in white canvas,
silent on an indolent inlet
they drift, sail.
Read the rest of Swans, and other poems
"Cliff Schrage anoints a grateful reader with the notion that a writer is one to restore the ravaged body of the world. His poetry is richly brimming with wisdom, feeling, metaphor, cadence, assonance, antiphonal lines...all the mechanisms that distinguish poetry."
—Vince Clemente, American poet, biographer, editor, Professor Emeritus at Stony Brook University
"As one who has always privately considered free verse as the inferior output of someone who cannot create rhyming, metered poetry, Cliff's works are a pleasant surprise. Lurking beneath seemingly random lines and mundane topics like a small town in Vermont the passing of a year, looking out a window on a greay rain, are powerful emotions that grab readers and bring them to reconsider their lives. Some day we will be shelving this collection next to the collected works of Robert Frost and wondering how this powerful voice was among us with so little notice."
—Tom Schultz, Publisher for Wood Islands Prints
