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96 pp, 1994
$14.00 paper 0-87745-451-5
Winner of the 1993 Iowa Poetry Prize
“Michael Heffernan's poems are candid and bold, rich in the unexpected, their words laid into lines firmly and naturally. Love's Answer is the best book yet by one of the very best poets we have.”—X. J. Kennedy
“Passionate and droll, these astonishing meditations on faith, desire, and memory divide the arrow at the center of the target again and again. Michael Heffernan is a poet of very great, very casual power.”—Robert Wallace
This is Michael Heffernan's fourth book of poetry, the work of a masterful and deeply intelligent practitioner at the height of his maturity. A pleasurable, wry, sweet book, full of prayers against the difficult passage of the night. Despite the surface demeanor, some of these poems seem to be rendered in a state of spiritual disquiet. There is also a powerful intellectual quarrel which Heffernan infuses into his work and through which he attempts to discover a sustaining metaphor rather than a rational conclusion.
ANOTHER PART OF THE FOREST
The mirror's image of the window
with its sprucetips in cerulean
puts pieces of that world beside
this piece of me. The mind within
the face the mirror faces says
There is a tall green shape against
the primal blue aglimmer with itself
abounding in the roots of silence.
Treetops keep quiet counsel.
I bring my face under the pane
and look. By God it's bright there
in the neighborhood of fellow men
gathering twigs from the wilderness
on the darksides of spruces. |
