The South by Walter Ruhlmann

You live in a world of stone and dust,
the western wind sweeps dead leaves,
makes rooms for the desert.
Hair fluffs act like tumbleweeds:
they disappear behind the furniture,
they stick to the blankets, the slippers,
even the vacuum cleaner feels useless.

On the road to the station, at dawn,
or on your way back home,
vineyards can’t even soothe you,
only the nectar they offer manages
to make you forget that soon
more corpses will invade your landscape,
will crowd over your space.

Walter Ruhlmann works as an English teacher, edits Datura, Beakful and Urtica. He has published close to thirty chapbooks and poetry collections both in French and English, and hundreds of poems worldwide. His blogs http://thenightorchid.blogspot.fr/ and 

https://nightorchidsselectedpoems.blogspot.com/

Chapbook Interview with Walter Ruhlmann

1.  Tell us about your latest poetry chapbook. 

The Loss is five-fold and each part is about five different types of loss: my self-confidence, my father, memory, the love in my partner, and my mind. It is during a period of doubt and hard times that these poems were written. 

2.  What was the inspiration behind it?

In 2012, I wrote another collection Crossing Puddles (coming up through Robocup Press later this year) and The Loss is more or less the sequel to this collection. It was a period of time when I was starting to reconstruct myself after a severe break-down, yet other events came crashing and disrupting this wellness I experienced then. Again, losing can take all sorts of shapes and occurs in many ways.

3.  What would you like readers and other poets to learn from this chapbook? Live your life fully because it's short.

4.  What advice would you give to a novice poet? 

Read. read. Read. then you can start writing. You will need to read more. and live a lot of things. Never discourage yourself and never let anyone put you down. You might not be the best writer ever, but you write and that is something.

5.  Thank you for joining us today.  How can we reach you?

My personal blog: http://thenightorchid.blogspot.com

Interested?  You can purchase The Loss & GMO by Walter Ruhlmann at Lulu.com.