At the end of Denise Levertov's "To the Reader", "the sea is turning its dark pages". While I was reading Aracelis Girmay's "The Black Maria" (Boa 2016), I heard a slight echo of Levertov's line in the poem "to the sea": "we touched / the brief pulse of your fluttering / pages". Although I didn't take this as an explicit allusion, I underlined "pages" as a note to myself. But at the end of the final poem in Girmay's book, "Fourth Estrangement, with a Petition for the Reunion of Jonathan & George Jackson", the possible Levertov connection sounds much more explicit: "the Pacific turning & turning // its infinitely black pages". (Andrew Shields, #111words, 13 August 2021)
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