Doris Brody Poetry

About the Poet: Doris Brody

Doris Brody was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She has a B.A in Art History from Michigan State University and an M.A, also in Art History, from the University of Wisconsin. She worked for 20 years as a science writer for the National Institutes of Health. A Jenny McKean Moore fellow in creative writing at George Washington University, she has presented her poetry in numerous venues throughout the Washington, D.C. area, including Miller's Cabin and the Library of Congress. Her poems have been published in literary journals and magazines nationwide.

Doris Brody's first book of poetry Judging the Distance was published by The Word Works Capital Collection and is available on Amazon. Her second poetry book, Then and Now: When Africa Changed my Life by Kelsay Books is also available on Amazon as well as Kelsay Books.

Poetry Books

With masterly precision of language and form, Doris Brody’s Then and Now: When Africa Changed My Life is a moving portrait of the poet’s journey from grief to renewal. Brody’s close observation of nature—especially birds—informs and enriches these poems. She moves from “White Owls” with its “cold white year of the helicopter . . .the screaming inside and out” to “Africa” where “(t)he future beckons, / unexpectedly ablaze.” Then and Nowis a magnificent collection, filled with beauty and hope.

— Miles David Moore, author of Man on Terrace with Wine

Would that we could view the world and its wonders with the wise eyes of this accomplished poet and birder whose poems reflect what life can offer. In her poem “Advice for Myself,” she says, “Listen. I wish the apples of paradise had no worms.” Brody displays her poetic skills primarily in free verse, but there’s a humorous, triple-sonnet about the challenges of modern plane travel. Occasionally her late husband visits her—a ghost she’s glad to keep alive—but she’s found new love, traveled distant corners of the globe, and described more exotic birds and animals than most of us can hope to see. She sees tiny sea life in “The Marsh at Barnegat Bay”as “a shiver of minnows tickle the surface.” These poems, blessed with such effective images, are accessible and rewarding.

— Gary Stein, author of Touring the Shadow Factory and Getting to Heaven

With a wide embrace of love, life, and the vibrating lands of this planet, Doris Brody confronts head on the dangers and demands of metaphoric and real tigers. Then and Now: When Africa Changed My Life is a substantial book of poetry always on alert to solve the puzzle for how to live.

— Karren L. Alenier, author of From the Belly: Poets Respond to Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons

These poems record a journey, not without distractions, through Northern woods and currents, farther ruins and coral seas, through our intermingled dreams and waking, lost and remembered lives. Brody has a birder's eye for the hawk-winged rivers of the air, a traveler's measured longing for mask and myth. Poem after poem affirms a keen and careful reckoning of what connects us to nature and each other.

— Judith McCombs

"I must head/off blind, reckoning the best I can" --so concludes 'Logbook,' a poem that could serve as an epigraph to this wise and satisfying collection. The poems in Judging the Distance sometimes begin in memory, sometimes in observation; however, they don't linger there. Memory and observation are Doris Brody's points of departure as poem after poem seeks for inherent meaning or ends up acknowledging its mystery and impenetrability

— Merrill Leffler

Doris Brody's poems mark it well: "mistakes have been made in judging the distance" out of here, out of our life on this planet. Her poems linger to take the measure of empty rooms, bird tremor, autumn cold, explosions of light on water, "a rustling that sometimes follows your path." The opening section of fourteen poems evokes that deep tropical world beneath us, a world here made dreamlike but awake. Ms. Brody's sense of the tropical underlying temperate experience, unstated but created, makes her first book a remarkable one.

— Rod Jellema

Selected Recent Poems


                        Overlooking Ocotal Bay
                           
                        We are here to bear witness 
                        to sit for the rising at dawn
                        the air pink and soft
                        boats silent and still
                        the full moon opalescent
                        on a slow slide into the sea.
                        
                        The plans for our days
                        move at a different pace.
                        The heat rises, wind rises,
                        distractions abound, we forget
                        the end, the beginning.
                        We forget what we know.
                        
                        We are here to bear witness
                        as the sun setting sends fire
                        into the sky, catches stray
                        tumbled clouds with a brief
                        wave of color, then falls
                        into black, black night.

                        
                        Tuesday Morning in the Fog
                        
                        There are no little cats in this marsh
                                where the fog swirls
                                        aggressive and dense.
                        
                        In the channel mud left
                                by the outgoing tide, the footprints
                                        are heron and rail.
                        
                        Small birds scuttle and flit,
                                reed thickets twitch when they land
                                        safely and hidden.
                        
                        The water beyond is concealed, no boat sounds
                                travel the bay, the world could
                                        end over there.
                        
                        This morning, walking alone, as damp
                                mist clings to my clothes, I must wait
                                        for what I cannot yet see.

                
        Icarus Revisited
                    
        “It is our duty to bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as possible”
                    
                — Elizabeth Strout
                    
        The humpback whale dives deep but still far less than was the Titan's goal.
        Ships and submarines can calculate imperfectly what keeps them whole.
        The flesh of whales sends signals telling them when to rise.
        The Titan failed this task.

        In the choppy ocean off the Jersey shore we bounce and plunge,
        the skyline of Manhattan hazy in the distance. We search for humpbacks,
        the whale most likely here to surface, breathe and blow a bushy spray.
        If we are lucky, we will see a fluke.

        But the whales, for reasons we don't know, decide to give a show.
        The waves explode, the whale is in our world for an instant only.
        A gigantic splash and he is gone. The boat rocks,
        the wind and waves continue. We watch for more.

        The depths he dove were safe. He dives again, breeches again and again.
        A dive propels the leap but no one knows why these whales breech.
        Not knowing is no burden. We can only wait,
        savoring what we've seen.

        *note: The Titan submersible imploded on June 18, 2023 killing 5 passengers. 
        The implosion was probably due to pressure during descent while trying to 
        reach the wreck of the Titanic.