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AND THE FINALISTS ARE...
LATE AT NIGHT IN THE ROWBOAT
poems by Donald Junkins
Poetry ISBN 0-9717265-8-2 $16.00 US
$25.00 CANADA 5.5 x 8.4 120pp |
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, Singing the Springs & Other
Poems, and Cafe Millennium & Other Poems
I admire the affection these poems display for the place on Earth in which they occur, and the way in which they constantly refresh that affection.
—Albert Goldbarth
LATE AT NIGHT IN THE ROWBOAT invites the reader into a
succession of vivid landscapes, and not incidentally, proves that
there's still life in the sonnet form. Technically, Donald Junkins
seems able to do anything. His new collection is a stand-out, one
that deserves cherishing.
—X.J. Kennedy, "Nude Descending the Staircase,"
and The Lords of Mis-Rule
I want to thank you for the gift of your handsome new book. I find
your craft often so sure that there is utterly no need to draw the
reader's attention to it. The voice is quiet and serious, the voice
of someone speaking to a friend late at night after the rumors of
the day have passed. I'm thinking of a poem like "Swan's Island:
Red Point: June 30" and the amazing Duke Ellington
poem and the poem about leaving Chico. (Did you ever live in Chico?
I get the sense you know that part of the West.) I was very moved
by the poem to Roland Winslow Junkins who I assumed was likely your
older brother. Such poems are so hard to write without falling into.
. . the place you don't want to fall.
American poetry has in the last fifteen or twenty years veered so far into stagecraft, grand opera, pure nonsense, deliberate obscurity passing for profundity that it was incredibly refreshing to read poems sculpted out of life, memory, and language, poems that could simply stop when what they had to say had been said. I hope this collection gets the attention it deserves.
—Philip Levine
FINALIST FOR POETRY BOOK OF THE YEAR:
Over the years ForeWord magazine
has had the distinct honor of acknowledging and recognizing excellence in publishing
from independent presses. This year, the seventh annual, was no exception.
From 1,540 book submissions to be considered for the 2005 Book of the Year Awards, an editorial team of judges narrowed the field to 604 finalists in 55 categories. Winners for Gold, Silver and Bronze will be determined by our readership of booksellers and librarians. ForeWord's BOTYA program was designed specifically for them to share in the process of discovering distinctive books across a number of genres with judgments based on their own authority in each category and on their patron/customer interests.
The winners—as well as Editor's Choice Prizes for Fiction and Nonfiction—will be announced at a special program at BookExpo America at the Washington Convention Center in Washington DC on Friday, May 19th, 2006.
Praise for Donald Junkins
About Donald Junkins’ 9th book of poems: Journey to the Corrida:
“Junkins’ poems are his tribute to Spain, and then his own experiences and imagination . . . No anxiety of influence here; simply inspiration and hidden tribute, and finely written lyrics. The poems . . . are domestic, downeast, salty, familial, and precise . . . . topics range from Euripides’ Andromache (which Junkins translated in the University of Pennsylvania Press series) to poems set in Spain, in Italy, in China, in Maine, in Michigan, in Bimini.”
—Robert Lewis, North Dakota Quarterly
“We see again the unmistakable Junkins poise and persistence in
pursuit of suppressed connections, hidden emotions and runaway home
truths. Stylistic brilliance enables him to capture the slow accretion,
the sudden jolt, the sheer thrill of the mind grasping what is simultaneously
happening within and outside itself. Poems that begin as benign
or quirky intimations in a real landscape he sees through to some
haunting destinations, always mindful of his own newly-minted proverb:
‘In dreams the dead talk/ straight to the heart.’ Junkins’ Corrida
is a gutsy and elegant performance.”
—Robert Bagg, The Scrawny Sonnets and Other Poems
About Crossing by Ferry:
“Junkins is a master craftsman:
he carefully turns a phrase, makes a pause, gives just enough to
snare readers into further shaping the situation for themselves.”
—Booklist
“If poems are successful when their execution perfectly fulfills the aims of their writers, then this new collection by Donald Junkins leaves little room for complaint. Given the generally relaxed standard of technique in American poetry today, this book is carefully, even lovingly written.”
—New York Times Sunday Book Review
About Playing for Keeps:
“Donald Junkins has been writing generous and sensual poems for
over 30 years . . . . At once slangy, whimsical, charged with dense
language, these poems pledge allegiance to diction both elastic
and classical . . . poems of an individual life, a record, deliberate
the entire time, genuine.” —Northhampton Gazette
About The Agamenticus Poems:
“These are fine, memorable poems that speak with the cadence of Maine and the murmur of old broken hearts and old healed ones. Agamenticus is a rounder, better-loved, truer terrain than Spoon River, and much closer to home.”
—The Boston Globe
About The Sunfish and the Partridge:
“I don’t know how Pym-Randall Press keeps snaring books that would be a credit to a New York publishing house. Donald Junkins’ first collection is a strong and satisfying one. He has lived widely and deeply. Surely ‘Walden, 100 Years After Thoreau’ is a sequence that belongs in any good contemporary anthology.”
—X.J. Kennedy
About Andromache:
“Andromache . . . in Junkins’ translation, manages to be both lovely and dignified.”
—New York Times Sunday Book Review
“. . . a terrific work . . . the language lively, fresh and contemporary without its being faddish or slangy—it sounds like real, contemporary English being spoken with urgency. . . . This text is so alive it should last for a very long time.”
—George Keithley, The Donner Party
About the Author
Donald Junkins is the most recent winner of the New Letters poetry
award, and has been the recipient of two National Endowment for
the Arts grants. His poems have appeared in nine anthologies including
American Anthology/2 (selected by Anne Sexton) and The New Yorker
Book of Poems. Major reviews of his poems have appeared in The Georgia
Review, The Sewanee Review, and The New York Times Book Review.
Junkins’ translation of Euripides’ Andromache appears in the Penn
Greek Drama Series, and he translated with Amiya Chakravarty, A
Tagore Reader. His own poems have been translated into French, Ukrainian,
and Chinese. He lives in Deerfield, Massachusetts with his wife,
Kaimei Zheng, with whom he has translated a volume of Li Bai’s (Li
Po) poems. His sixteen line definition of a New Englander appears
in John Murray’s A Gentleman Publisher’s Commonplace Book. Junkins
is the poetry editor of the North Dakota Quarterly.
When I Was Twelve
I caught alewives
with my hands
in the concrete troughs
easing Lily Pond down
to the Saugus River,
and spread them
on the grass like knives
glistening in the sun
glistening in the kitchen light
on Saturday night
spread headless on the Lynn Item
bones and soft-flesh
in the photograph,
knuckles on the trough slime
finger touch, the brush
of tail, the rush
of shadows gone.
© 2005 Donald Junkins
In Tiananmen Square Five Weeks After
we speed thirty-five miles
an hour and the driver will not be responsible
for our cameras if we take Mao almost smiling
in his Mausoleum photograph before the aisles
of troop trucks and the lonely standing boys with gun barrels
pointing at the sky across their breasts, and pull
over at the gate to the Forbidden City, tall
and red and everything the movie Last Emperor tells
except the square with the five thousand Buddhist monks
and the grass growing seedy in the cracks between the chunks
of courtyard stones: soldiers on R and R now filing
into the empty court smiling,
teenage boys squatting into regiments of quail
in soft brown uniforms, happy below the bullhorn’s call
to their regimental colors and their Colonel’s
stare toward the General’s air of non-committal
observant nonchalance. Soon five thousand soldiers fill
the square and file in a double-column hustle
past the jade black turtle and the gilded bronze unicorn
through the Hall of Supreme Harmony, and then they’re gone.
© 2005 Donald Junkins
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