Trained as a musician and composer, Barter’s poems are driven by the rhythm and lyricism, punctuated with occasional dissonances that startle the reader with profound perceptions hidden within deceptively straightforward “melodies.” Whether exploring the misadventures of youth or the petty defeats of encroaching middle age, Barter evokes the bittersweet feeling of being “sad in the deep-sweet way/
Poetry. Winner of the 2003 Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry. The quality of persistent attention in Berger's work constitutes, I think, the heart of the poetic act. It is hard enough to find the inner space and self-command for that attention in our time; it is a matter of verbal gift and discipline to be able to make such attention audible to others.
The poet - a man of the world in the widest sense - reflects and in reflection relives the intense experiences that shaped him and that have shaped our modern world.
A vivid and unsentimental examination of brutality and the scars it leaves, this collection by London’s Dan Burt is a memoir in poetry and prose of his harsh, formative, working-class world. Both elegiac and philosophical, the poems highlight the poet’s skill with traditional forms and match the scale of his concerns with a substantial formal architecture and an answerable narrative.
Poetry. The most striking aspect of Dennis Camire's poems is how they recalibrate our lens on the familiar. They celebrate poignant moments when honest curiosity allows a reader to assume an unfamiliar point of view.--Jeanine Hathaway.
Poetry. Women's Studies. PRINCIPLES OF ECONOMICS is a series of interconnected elegies for the poet's former partner and her father, who died within 6 months of each other.
AN INVITATION You are cordially invited to enjoy this collection of poems written for family and friends and you. Poetry is born after a long gestation, longer for some poems than others, shaped by relationships challenging and fulfilling, always the fruit of reflection and insights into what we value most.
Poets of Maine is a collection of poetry from writers who have lived, or are currently living in the state of Maine. Poets selected for this compilation are the winners of the 2018 Poets of Maine competition. Poets of Maine celebrates both novice and established poets in this debut anthology.
in the absence of the sun is a poetry collection that explores our midnight thoughts--the "nightmares" and "dreams" that haunt us when we are unable to sleep. This collection takes you through a night of insomnia, ruminating on ideas of self-doubt, loss, and hope for the future.
Velvet Goodbyes is an ode to days long gone-the laughter, and tears that filled them- as well as all the days to come. This poetry collection explores ideas of sadness, loss, progression, empowerment, and aspiration. It serves as a dedication to cherished memories, and new ones to be made as life continues to change.
This highly stylized, intelligent and witty debut collection of poems is at times humorous, at times insightful, always fresh and sophisticated. Betsy Scholl has said of Keith, "His poems are both skeptical and grateful, full of wonder and irony." Keith has been on the poetry scene for years and formerly co-edited both the Columbia Review and Cutbank while earning his MFA at Montana.
Poetry. In this transcendent new collection, memory is the fulcrum of clear-eyed, beautiful, and life-affirming reflection. Richard Foerster's BOY ON A DOORSTEP brings together some of his finest work of seven previous volumes, plus a generous gathering of new visions.
Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 2015.
Winner of the Book Award for Poetry, Maine Literary Awards, 2017.
Bernard A. Booker, old Maine codger and unofficial mayor of Ell Pond, knew the right ways to dig an eight-foot hole, build a maple sugar house out of a water heater, and snatch good white granite from other people’s back lots.
Whether turning their gaze to Midas's daughter or the silverware in a kitchen drawer, the immersive experience of reading or the dislocation of looking into a rearview mirror, the everyday or the surreal, Joal Hetherington's prose poems reveal fractal complexities and glimpses of the rich weave of emotion and experience that inhabit even the most innocuous words and gestures.
Poetry. With variously sized poetic scopes, ever focused, Leonore Hildebrandt finds us connective paths through space and time, delineating the material and spiritual dimensions of shelter. WHERE YOU HAPPEN TO BE takes its cue--and title--from Buckminster Fuller's directive: 'The most important thing to teach your children is that the sun does not rise and set.
Poetry. Stuart Kestenbaum is a poet of immense fluency, elegance, and deep humanity. I bow to his work--Naomi Shihab Nye. Stuart Kestenbaum writes the kind of poems I love to read, heartfelt responses to the privilege of having been given a life. No hidden agendas here, no theories to espouse, nothing but life, pure life, set down with craft and love--Ted Kooser.
Poetry. Stuart Kestenbaum's ONLY NOW is a rare accomplishment: a collection of poems that takes on the fragility of the world and our own mortality, and does so with unflinching directness and, most impressively, with wit and a sincere prayerfulness. Many of these poems are what I would call strangely hopeful warnings, elegies-in- advance.
Peter Kilgore spent most of his life in Falmouth and Portland, Maine. His poetry, collected for the first time here in Quarry, appeared in literary magazines and small press books from the 1970s through the time of his death in 1992.
"A graceful and moving glimpse into a rare and giving artist's refined poetics, garden aesthetics, and spirituality."—Booklist
Poetry. TILLER NORTH takes us behind the walls of a fishing village in coastal Maine. With her insider's voice, Rosa Lane breaks the code of silence in her telling: secrets embedded within class, sexual identity, familial relationships, death, and rebirth.
"Where am I - at a third read or a fourth? Paul Liebow's poetry reaches the widest range of subjects, with a remarkable breadth of style, all at the depth of the heart. Window after window is opened.
Kristen Lindquist’s new collection of poems, “Tourists in the Known World,” is a welcome reminder of what one of Maine’s best practicing poets has been up to persistently for years at her home in Camden: making authentic translations of the directly experienced world into poetry.
In The Maine Poets, editor Wesley McNair has selected work by poets of the state from Longfellow to the present. Chosen for their appeal to the general reader, these poems honor the full vision and diversity of Maine's poets as they address life in Maine and in all human places.
Faced with shattering loss, how do you fasten yourself to life again? Poet storyteller Wesley McNair weaves stories of the pursuit of beauty, the blessings of nature, and the connections we make with others in the course of everyday life that bring hope in the midst of unfastening.
A New England Book Award Finalist. "There's so much life in this beautiful book that it feels like a living thing. Wesley McNair is a kind of Chekhov of American poetry."--Ted Kooser, Pulitzer Prize winner and Poet Laureate.
The poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) have been long admired for the lyric beauty that is especially characteristic of her early works. "Renascence," the first of her poems to bring her public acclaim, was written when she was nineteen. Now one of the best-known American poems, it is a fervent and moving account of spiritual rebirth.
Hailed as 'A hearty weed in the garden of American poetry' Dave Morrison's poems have been published in literary magazines and anthologies, and featured on Writer's Almanac. 'Fail' is his eighth collection of poetry. "There is no voice quite like his.
Memoir. Mosaic. Miniatures. Meditations. Morsels. Beads on a string. Love notes to the Muse. Poems. Not-poems. Songs of praise. Psalms. "Compelling and wise as the mystical musings of Rumi, these psalms sing it loud and yet whisper secrets in your ear.
Welcome Homesick is poet Dave Morrison's thirteenth collection. "...a hearty weed in the garden of American poetry." P.H. Madore, Dispatch "There is no voice quite like his. What shines in every poem is musical sound and rhythm, grittiness, reality, humor, and the rare ability to tackle serious subjects without taking himself too seriously.
Hailed as 'a hearty weed in the garden of American poetry', Morrison has published fifteen collections of poetry, and his poems have been featured in literary magazines and anthologies, as well as Writer's Almanac, Take Heart, and Poems from Here."Dave Morrison's poems are direct and clever in expression, vivid in image, explicit in emotion, and overflowing with perceptive awe for the everyday wor
Mullin updates the sonnet's content with musings on "quotidian" events - the evening news, shopping for clothes, a baseball pitcher, a Derby winner -- while also showcasing a deep appreciation of the natural world. She uses the traditional fourteen lines and a variety of rhyme schemes to explore the sonnet form itself.
Poetry. One of the most difficult things in poetry is to control the 'I, ' to let it stay innocent, to let it act and be acted upon freshly in the poem. Dawn Potter manages this difficult trick with ease.
For decades, experimental musicians have created new hit songs by repurposing lyrics or melodies from previous hits. In 1969, "Come Together," by The Beatles sampled, "You Can't Catch Me," by Chuck Berry. In 1989, "Fight the Power," by Public Enemy sampled, "Funky Drummer," by James Brown. "Iron Man," by Black Sabbath was sampled in "Hell of a Life," by Kanye West in 2010.
Salty Liquor is Rainford's first full-length collection of poems. Gary Rainford lives on Swans Island in Maine year-round with his wife and daughter. His poetry, shaped by tides and saltwater, is published in a wide range of literary magazines and university journals, including North Dakota Quarterly, Words and Images, Aurorean, Omphalos, Kindred, and Blast Furnace.
Written over a span of fifty plus years, this collection of poems is revealing in its exploration of romance, love, joy, sorrow, family, memory and reflection as integral parts of the journey that is life.
The bluesy, rich, and vital poems in House of Sparrows look for grace and beauty not outside of the suffering world but within it. Betsy Sholl explores the shifting ironies and contradictions in the stories we tell—how the apple is both medicinal and poison, and how the poor are spiritually rich.
Winner of the 2014 Four Lakes Poetry Prize
What if ruin is a good thing? What if each day is built on the ruin of the one before? What if all our attempts to avoid ruin only make us bitter or closed off from what’s around us?
Poetry. The task David Sloan takes on in this collection is nothing less than to depict the struggle to live an authentic life as a necessarily flawed human being.
Poetry. Jewish Studies. THE THINKING HEART is a performance piece in two voices, with cello, based on the journal and letters of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch woman who lived in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation and died in Auschwitz in 1943. The performance is an original arrangement of her journal and letters in the form of poems written by Martin Steingesser.
Inspired by The Pine Tree State--Maine's diverse landscape, natural beauty, rural communities, and independent people--the author's 150 haiku poems, along with her photographs, reflect the Maine she knows and loves. Bette A. Stevens's imagery draws the reader into her world of wonder and delight.
Poetry. POEMS FROM THE POND is a beautiful, astute collection that from the 'ordinary' extracts the 'extraordinary' Candice Stover's language is precise yet lush and the fact of a pond in Somesville, Maine, emerges as ever so much more than a fact. Informed by deep gratitude, her poems register a spirit presence that in the many guises of the seasons shimmers with feeling--Baron Wormser.
Blueberry Moon is a compilation of Haiku, a traditional form of Japanese poetry, and answering ink paintings. Inspired by nature and the seasons throughout the state of Maine, these Haiku poems and illustrations celebrate the small details that connect us to the present moment.
Zen based spiritual prose and poetry on the fallacy of time, love, and life on the forever changing stage of humankind.
Poetry. Donald Wellman proposes THE CRANBERRY ISLAND SERIES as a work of 'autoethnography, ' incorporating poetry, translation, autobiography, family history, and geography--all focused on the Cranberry Islands in the Gulf of Maine. Like a hardy tree stretching its roots into crannies of wind-swept stone, Wellman burrows into people and places of his locale and their effects upon his own life.
Poetry. Winner of the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry. In these deft poems Mimi White traces with great sensitivity a landscape of intimacy. It is a place that is hazardous and rewarding, brimming with feeling that has been tried and retried. One reads poetry to deepen one's sense of what it is to be alive--these poems do that with admirable concision--Baron Wormser.
Often rooted in nature, the poems in Holding Ground are written from a precipice, in the space of a quiet whisper before the howl of the approaching storm: “Let’s look for shelter,” he says. The effect is an atmosphere of yearning, and of searching to understand the simple as well as the difficult moments in a life.
Sally Woolf-Wade, in her newest poetry collection, Wolf Moon Down, gives us memories of travel, far, far away, and ultimate settling at home in coastal Maine.
She has profound appreciation for Maine's natural beauty, its maritime history, and its often enigmatic folks. Woolf-Wade skillfully weaves various poetic
The collection of poems, Leaves Falling Upon the Sky, Reflections of a Life so Far, invites the reader to examine ordinary life events such as "Mowing the Lawn" and "Peeling Potatoes" from a unique perspective. Estelle's way of seeing is, as the title suggests, like looking at autumn leaves drifting upwards towards the sky rather than falling down to earth.
