Amy Lowell Prize Finalist, selected by Jason O’Toole
Meredith Bergmann is an award-winning sculptor whose public monuments can be seen in New York, Boston and beyond. She was poetry editor of American Arts Quarterly from 2006-2017. Her poetry publications include Barrow Street, Connecticut River Review, Contemporary Poetry Review, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, Light, Mezzo Cammin, New Criterion, New Verse Review, Tri Quarterly Review and the anthologies Hot Sonnets, Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle, Alongside We Travel: Contemporary Poets on Autism, Powwow River Poets Anthology II, The Country in the Mirror: Poems of Protest and Witness, and As of Fire: Poets and Pentecost. She won the 2026 Write Prize for Poetry from Able Muse, three honorable mentions from the Frost Farm Poetry Prize, and in 2020, a 2nd prize from the Connecticut Poetry Club. Her chapbook A Special Education is available online from Bainbridge Island Press, and The Dying Flush, 2024, with poetry and illustrations by Bergmann, is available from EXOT Books. Her work may be seen at www.meredithbergmann.com.
Between Two Quarries
Paul Manship, best known for his Prometheus Fountain in Rockefeller Center, lived and
worked at Starfield on Cape Ann from 1944 to 1966.
The sculptor called this place, his new home, Starfield,
for its dark nights when he could lift his eyes
to swaths of stars, their ancient fires revealed,
hung in the arbor, or in another guise
reflected in the quarry ponds, annealed
to hard white flecks. The sculptor’s work implies
he loved hard edges, granite honed and sealed,
but in summer dusk soft lights began to rise
and, prizing them, he loved this land, his Starfield,
because its dark was full of fireflies.
He mowed his meadow late, to let it yield
another season’s flickering in the skies.
He knew the price of stolen fire, concealed
from heaven. His Prometheus defies
the myth, holds high a flame, a heat, to wield
against the icy days when a meadow dies.