Late at Night in the Rowboat: Poems

In these new poems, Donald Junkins again gives his readers the remarkable constructs of precision and voice and craft they have come to expect from him. His formal poise and meditative music convey the reader through highly particularized places and times to numinous Place and Time, always lingering at the crossroads of landscape and inscape. Retracing paths of memory, Junkins leads his readers toward the harbor of true placidity where, through the larger motions of the heart, we stand a chance of loving well the world. In these poems there may be homesickness–or mal du pays–for many homes, many places, many countries, many times, but they will have no truck with mere nostalgia, that sentimental drive to surrender the present to the past. What the poet creates brilliantly here is the essential poetic archeology, sifting the ruins of the past to make sense of the present, and thus an imaginable future. Readers will discover in these landscapes that are at once achingly real and hauntingly magical, both loss and grace, and renewals that redeem remorse and regret. With something very much like prayerful reverence for exactitude and truth, these poems do what Bergson says art must do-they bring us into our own presence. –H.R.Stoneback