Bücher veröffentlicht von Antrim House

This volume of poems will make your heart swell and your voice erupt in unexpected laughter. It is filled at once with the joy and the pathos of life as we dance on the rim of life at Seabury Retirement Community. Rennie McQuilkin captures the spirit and the hope-filled days that lead us into our future. And when you read, read silently and aloud as well. It will be a life-touching experience.

After completing several writing projects, Connecticut Poet Laureate Rennie McQuilkin was ready to "sell his camel," as the Bedouins say. But poems continued to rise up, at first sporadically and then in March of 2017, more insistently, perhaps incited by the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, which he founded, and a "strangely sanguine sense of mortality." From then until late in the year, he wrote a poem per day, often late at night when he fell into "bemused mullings of the day's events." Afterword is a sampling of those poems, going back to early 2016. Written in down-to-earth language whose apparent simplicity belies rich undercurrents of meaning, the poems show that the usual can be most unusual; they encourage readers to look twice at what may seem like minor occurrences in their own lives. About the book, Richard Blanco (Presidential Inauguration poet for Barack Obama) writes, "As the title so aptly evokes, the poems in Afterword read like tender after-thoughts on those seemingly ordinary encounters of our lives which are rendered into the extraordinary through McQuilkin's keen eye and exquisitely shaped language."

There is magic in the incantatory, free-flowing poems of Martha Readyoff''s Little Lives. In these poems, the natural world is both vibrantly real and enchantingly fanciful. And we find here a passion for all that is vulnerable in the world, the little lives of children and all natural creatures. Be ready for a wild and thoroughly enjoyable ride. It will change you.

In his new book, The Rounding, Rennie McQuilkin faces down the horrors of 2020-2021, seeing them clearly but focusing on ways in which he and other survivors have found ways to ride out the storm. The poet finds salvation in the natural world, the arts, gardening, and care for others. He clings to a precarious religious faith, just as he clings to the cliff of the troubled world, keeping his fingernails in fighting trim.  

Al Basile''s poems have style, joy, and - above all - verve. Sometimes they unfold with the lyric expansiveness of great jazz solos. Sometimes they shine as beautifully jeweled miniatures. What a pleasure to read a book of poems with such unabashed energy. Al Basile''s playful ease with the pentameter line bespeaks a sensibility trained in the subtleties of musical rhythm and voice. Turn almost anywhere in this rich collection from five decades and you''ll find "an instinct for the game, and more." He produces poems that are almost holographic in their insistence on bringing their author into the reader''s space, where he - his tone of voice, body language and facial expressions - constitute an uncanny presence. The very title of the book identifies the author as a music-maker determined to be heard, and as a poet whose first concern is achieving the tone in which he wants to be heard by the reader.

Philip Levine has written that Don Barkin''s work shows "wonderful skill." The Rail Stop at Wassaic bears out that assessment. Like the poet''s previous book, Houses, it is "both domestic and fierce, accessible and resonant, including many poems that have the audacity to follow traditional patterns of rhyme and meter." Barkin''s earlier volume, That Dark Lake, was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award, presented under the aegis of the Library of Congress. 

The poems in John Muro''s first book, In the Lilac Hour & Other Poems, move with a sure hand between closed forms (especially sonnets), invented forms, poems after writers like Keats and Frost, and free verse; and they are committed to seeing and honoring the passing of seasons, of friends and family, and to the birds and flowers that constitute the local reality of our everyday lives. Looking closely and surely at the world around him, Muro''s descriptive abilities are everywhere apparent: the crack of a screen door shutting lingers "long on pneumatic air"; a pear is a "tilted Buddha"; swans are "high, heavy clouds / idly set upon the water"; cardinal flowers are "incendiary petal flare, the arching thrust / Of fireworks in descent." But the poems always widen from a series of exacting and fresh images to a wider context-the diminishing habitat of Lady Slippers or a Swainson''s Thrush running up against the glass windows of a suburban house. These deft and heartfelt poems trace our connections and disconnections to nature, community, and family while amplifying and celebrating life.  

A chronological series of poems depicting the life of a cancer patient in the first year of his male breast cancer treatment. Moving, often witty, both reverent and irreverent, the book is a praise song written with courage and good humor. Eamon Grennan has called it "a wonder." He goes on to say, "With undaunted courage, insight and an always ready, irrepressibly generous humor even in the face of mortal illness, these poems are brief, brilliant testaments to the poet's stubborn will to praise, to celebrate the radiant ongoingness of the natural and human worlds that he has taken, it seems, into his care."