Faculty Member Publishes Second Book of Poems

Michael Cervas’ newest book of poems, “Captivated,” was published in June by Antrim House. In the book, Michael, who serves as head of the Westminster English Department, “pulls out all the stops” according to his publisher, the poet Rennie McQuilkin. “As in his earlier book, ‘Inside the Box’ (2007), readers are given splendid poems in which history, science, foreign culture and sport are metaphors for essential truth, but now there is an even greater admixture of hilarity and irony, increased emotional depth and a series of love poems to die for, though beneath it all, a current of melancholy runs deep.”

Michael’s book “begins with poems of childhood, an Edenic condition in which the serpent is never far off but sometimes forgotten. Throughout the book, jubilation and anxiety do battle and both win.”

In his review of “Captivated,” former Westminster faculty member Brian Ford writes, “Along Route 9 west of Boston is a sign advertising two establishments in a nearby strip mall: ‘Feng Shui’ and ‘Chuck E. Cheese.’ I've passed it half a dozen times, always with an internal chuckle, and thought about making a poem or essay out of it. But I’m not Michael Cervas; I don’t have his eye or his passion for making poems of what he sees.

“I’m particularly reminded, by this sign, of one poem in his new collection, ‘Captivated.’ The poem is called ‘The Darkest Hour.’ An instructional video created for the drivers of school buses leads him in the tedious darkness of watching it to Saul on the road to Tarsus, to Genghis Khan at the outset of his journey to empire, to the candle-lit dark of a table where a relationship is about to begin. At a certain moment of dawn or early evening, the narrator of the video says, ‘the road will be dark’ — a warning Cervas turns into a promise. Whether it’s the promise of day or the promise of night doesn’t seem to matter to the poet; his own setting out can begin anywhere and lead anywhere, always following roads both wholly his own and immediately recognizable when they've been pointed out to the reader.

“Cervas’ own experience, from the house on Thorn Drive outside Pittsburgh where he grew up to the nuns who taught him to the squash courts of the school where he works, informs the collection from beginning to end. The opening poem takes place in the woods near that boyhood home, the final, title poem takes place in the landscape, 300 years ago, of the school where he teaches. The interior landscapes, however, from the boy’s mingled sense of safety and fear to the memories and regrets of a son and father and lover to the responses of a European traveler, range across the universe (‘Sun and Moon, and Stars’) and into the ‘omphalos’ of ancient Greece, Delphi (in a four-part poem of that name). And always one sees because he saw, and thought, and found words.

“Cervas is capable of wild humor (as in ‘Super Sex Breakthrough’), deep, private tenderness (‘On Living in a City Not Far from the Zoo’), and the wonders of world history (‘Journeys’). Always what one is struck by most, whatever the subject and whatever turns a poem takes from where it starts, is the eye for this painful Eden we inhabit in all its cryptic freedom.”

Besides teaching English, Michael directs Westminster’s Poetry Festival as well as the Friday Night Readings series. He also enjoys playing music (especially jazz) and sports (especially squash), both of which he considers simply to be other forms of poetry. Michael will officially “launch” the book with a reading on Sept. 20 at 7 p.m. in the Gund Reading Room of the Cole Library. In the meantime, anyone who wishes to purchase an autographed copy of the book should send Michael an e-mail at mcervas@westminster-school.org.

Two poems from his new book include:

Like the purple scar carved

deep in the night’s sky

by the sudden flash

of a shooting star

your absence

stays with

me for

ever.

If a boy wanted something to eat

on a summer’s morning in the woods

behind our house on Thorn Drive

— something sweet and cold —

he had only two choices really.

He could shinny up the thick trunk

of the ancient black cherry tree

in the very middle of our forest,

inch himself out precariously

along the ever-narrowing branches,

then reach up to grab the wine-

dark cherries floating in the sky,

pop them by handfuls into his mouth

and spray the pits out in a juicy rain.

Or he could squirrel his way deep

into the center of the wild blackberries

that hugged the ridge at the border

of the woods and the old farmer’s land,

risking scratches and skinned elbows

to tunnel far enough into the dark canopy

of bushes to find the ripest ones,

thimbles that stained his fingers and face

with wild splotches of mulberry paint

and soaked into his shorts so deeply

he could smell the berries’ tartness

fermenting there even months later.

Either place, up high and suspended

above the forest’s carpet of loam

or lying down low on the soft ground

in the silence of the aromatic earth,

a boy felt alone, safe and scared.