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HABITATION

HABITATION

$25.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9911465-5-0

Pub Date: Sept. 2014

Pages: 624


By Sam Hamill


Habitation collects the best poetry from a career spanning more than forty years by the distinguished Northwest poet-editor-translator, Sam Hamill. Drawn from fifteen volumes of celebrated poetry, whether in brief haiku-like poems or long-ranging narratives, Habitation presents a lyrical voice that is unique in American poetry today.


Hamill has reached the category of a National Treasure, though I doubt he’d like the idea.

—Jim Harrison



    No one—I mean no one ever—has done the momentous work of presenting poetry better than Sam Hamill. His poetry is no less than essential.

    —Hayden Carruth


    When future generations want to know the truth of these times, they will turn to the words of Sam Hamill. This poet is a visionary—the kind of visionary who rolls up his sleeves and gets to work. In his, ‘Ars Poetica,’ he writes: ‘We go down to the sea and set sail/ for a world beyond war, / knowing we will never find it./ We are not heroes./ We sail The Justice and The Mercy/ because these boats need rowing.’ In these poems of justice and mercy, with great clarity of thought and language, Sam Hamill defines a culture of conscience.

    —Martín Espada


    Sam Hamill is a writer unabashedly taking his place within the community of literature and the community of all sentient beings—his fidelity is to the magnificent truth of existence, and to its commensurate singing.

    —Jane Hirshfield


    Sam Hamill was born in 1943 and grew up on a Utah farm. He is Founding Editor of Copper Canyon Press and served as Editor there for thirty-two years. He taught in artist-in-residency programs in schools and prisons and worked with Domestic Violence programs. He directed the Port Townsend Writers Conference for nine years, and in 2003, founded Poets Against the War. He is the author of more than forty books, including celebrated translations from ancient Chinese, Japanese, Greek and Latin.

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