Theater of Memory, New and Selected Poems of Mark Perlberg will be published posthumously by Louisiana State University Press in the fall of 2012. The book will include poems written toward the end of his life in 2008, as well as selections from his earlier books.

Three previously unpublished poems from Theater of Memory will appear in the Spring issue of Prairie Schooner, published by the University of Nebraska.

This month's poem from Theater of Memory

Self Portrait: Camille Pissarro

He stares at me like my conscience,
looming before a window open on a street
in Paris. His life is almost over.
He says: This is who I am.

All is dark and silvery. The fall
of his beard, light glinting on a rim
of his half-glasses. The window silvery
   behind him.
He says: The world doesn’t flow in circus colors.
That vision isn’t serious. It moves in plainer
shades: browns, greens, cloud colors,
and this buoyant silvery light of Paris.

He says: I prefer what happens again and again.
Peasants in a row mowing. Patterns of
    movement
on the boulevards, shifting yet the same.
A farm girl in a violet dress,
head awkwardly bent, musing over her
    bowl of coffee.