The Candle is a record, unlike any other in literature, of an American poet’s staring into the central atrocities of our Twentieth Century, of his struggle against soul-sickness as he attempts, over almost fifty years, by way of despised and barbaric poetry (in Theodor Adorno’s terms), to find ways to realize (make real), to understand, and to remember.

William Heyen is a former Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American literature in Germany. Crazy Horse in Stillness won the Small Press Book Award, Shoah Train was a National Book Award finalist, and A Poetics of Hiroshima was a selection of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.