A collection of 80 poems selected by the author of summer, as he is sometimes known. The late great Benjamin Saltman once wrote this about the poetry of Nicholas Campbell: "Some days summer lasts forever," Nicholas Campbell writes. "Mine banged open and closed." "You open this door into summer, and the poems linger after they close. You wear them like talismans, like amulets that protect you against despair and urge you to go on. This book continues a tradition of lyric intensity, of short poems which enter immediately into ...
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A collection of 80 poems selected by the author of summer, as he is sometimes known. The late great Benjamin Saltman once wrote this about the poetry of Nicholas Campbell: "Some days summer lasts forever," Nicholas Campbell writes. "Mine banged open and closed." "You open this door into summer, and the poems linger after they close. You wear them like talismans, like amulets that protect you against despair and urge you to go on. This book continues a tradition of lyric intensity, of short poems which enter immediately into meaning, and have the sort of mysterious clarity we find in work by William Stafford, Robert Francis, and Bert Meyers. In Campbell's poems the ordinary things of the world are richly symbolic, not wrenched into wild metaphor. Screen doors, railroad tracks, milkweed, hammocks, snow chains, pigeons. The world does not need to be exotic to be rich and moving. In these poems, you can see a lot of Nicholas Campbell, a man who has given himself over into poetry as he has to his friends, with compassion and humor. Optimistic ironies lurk behind the simplest phrases: "Nothing has to end" in Campbell's poems also means "Nothingness has to end." These poems set themselves the task of dealing with loss of childhood and of love, those great themes which can only be death with, if we are honest, piecemeal. And yet these poems about parents and clouds and "nothing" add up slowly, drop by drop. These poems require a quiet kind of attention, and in return yield increments of hope. Benjamin Saltman, 1993
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