Writer
New Poems appearing in the Fall 2009 BigCityLit
Crucial Blue: a poetry collection
Please Note: Crucial Blue (originally under contract with Rager Media, Inc. for release in 2007) has been withdrawn from production. Due to financial constraints, Rager Media is no longer publishing poetry.
Words of praise from reviewer Elizabeth Spires:
"Madeleine Mysko's subject in this fine, fluent first collection is no less than a thorough examination of the signifcant moments of everyday life . . . An acute observer of both nature and human nature, Mysko desires to 'reach deep,' and in doing so, invites the reader to enter a world made whole and sacred by her penetrating eye and practiced heart. There is a striking, unforced reverence here for all aspects of the human, and a lucidity reminiscent of Philip Larkin."
Listen to Apr 18, 2008 Interview with Lara Jones on KCPW Salt Lake City :
Many of the poems collected in Crucial Blue have been published over the years in literary journals--The Hudson Review, Shenandoah, River Styx, among others. The title of the collection is taken from a line of "Out of Blue":
I had to lean into the broad leaves, to reach
Deep and snap stems until my arms
Were filled with blooms big as baby bonnets.
The broken-green odor blessed the air
As I carried that crucial blue across the lawn,
And the maples blanched at the first gust of wind.
The crucial here is the work of the poet in voicing human experience as a kind of praise. Oftentimes, poetry is found in the deep reach, in the unconscious. For the cover art, the poet has chosen the work of her own daughter, whose "dream baby" paintings address the same pressing issues of the unconscious and the responsibility of the artist.
Among the poems included in Crucial Blue is "Incipient Fireworks," chosen by Donald Justice as winner of the 1997 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award (The Formalist, Vol. 8, Issue 2, 1997).
Incipient Fireworks
Nine p.m., July the fourth. The roof,
Broadway Garage, Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Our little crowd is pressed against the rail:
employees, lots of children, and enough
patients--in wheelchairs, pushing I.V. poles--
that here, among the cars, our measures seem
extreme. A roof away, the trauma team
lights up the landing pad. A siren wails
thinly from some foresaken street below.
But we remain intent on waiting for
the dark to deepen, absolutely sure,
the weather being fair, that we will know--
any second, every one of us--
the thrill of the expected come to pass.
Theft On the answering machine, her voice is faint, I can feel the thrumming train, A thing of beauty, the poet says, will never
from Crucial Blue:
not with the distance, but with the hurt.
She says she painted all afternoon in the city,
but the canvas is gone—stolen
while she was sleeping on the train.
It was good too, she says. A good start.
the heat, the daylight lingering heavily
on the skyline beyond the window, the tiredness
of travel, the tiredness after good work.
I see how it must have happened:
her head nodding, and the shadow moving
toward her, down the aisle, and then away.
pass into nothingness. Beautiful—that painting once
propped beside her, on the train, in the faraway city.
Beautiful still, in the hands of the thief.