Unsettled Accounts

<div> <p>To take the mess of life and make meaning from it is what all poets seek to do. For <b>Will Wells</b> recipient of the thirteenth annual Hollis Summers Poetry Prize this includes reaching across centuries and continents into the minds and hearts of disparate individuals-Albert Einstein Andrea Yates the traveler from Porlock Dante or Holocaust survivors including his own grandmother-to extract the personal value embedded there for him.</p> <p>By turns funny shocking gentle and musing the poems of <i>Unsettled Accounts</i> reflect <b>Will Wells</b>'s constant attention to his environment and to his past-and to our environment and our past-and his persistent effort to keep them real and whole by turning them into art.</p> <p><b>Ping-Pong with the Nazis</b></p> <p>Bored couriers have kicked off boots and set<br> their pipes aside a Dutch interior.<br> The slapped ball clacks over the table<br> like a telegraphic code then trickles<br> like faint hope across the marble floor.<br> How quickly he bends to retrieve it<br> and puts it back in play the Jewish boy<br> living with false papers in a villa<br> owned by his mother's Gentile friends and now<br> commandeered by retreating Germans<br> as divisional headquarters. The young<br> blond soldiers deferential to a social<br> better muss his blond locks like the kid<br> brothers back in the fatherland like big<br> brothers steeped in genial menace.<br> He begs another game so they relent.<br> As the ball resumes its chatter across<br> the no-man's-land strung with a net<br> he calculates the risk that each shot brings.<br> And so do they. He holds his pee and serves.</p> <p><br></p> </div>