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WALKING DISTANCE

WALKING DISTANCE

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9883166-0-7

Pub Date: Mar. 2013

Pages: 72


By Michael Heffernan


Michael Heffernan has sustained and amplified a poetry of real intelligence, technical precision, and acoustic splendor. He is sure-footed in his craft enough to let imagination run and leap and dance.

—Thomas Lynch, on The Back Road to Arcadia


In Michael Heffernan’s disarming poetry, the pagan’s inchoate urgencies meet the saint’s call to reflection and praise—the abject converses with the elevated, the comic qualifies the sanctified. Heffernan’s voice, immediately recognizable among those of his generation, is the playfully serious sound of an enduring personality.

—Ron Slate, author of The Great Wave

    Country

    And one leaf trembled, then another one,

    and Queen Anne’s lace kept tilting onto itself.


    I got there thinking there must be dragonflies.

    A mountain with a flat top was coming in,


    so I moved past it toward another mountain

    with different green among its kinds of green


    that made a simple strand of woven gold,

    and a little stand of trees off to one side.


    There was a house, with a shed like an old barn.

    And two crows spread their wings over the sun.


    -Michael Heffernan


    Copyright © 2013 by Michael Heffernan


    Michael Heffernan has been crafting poems for over fifty years. They occupy a space in his ordinary life and the world he enters in company with his own multifarious first person singular, who is often talking. When he stops doing that, something may get written down. The poem, then, begins to live in its own place where, for a moment, nothing is ordinary. Meanwhile, blocks away, a boy is walking and talking to himself. And a dog barks.


    Michael Heffernan makes his home with his wife Ann in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he has taught poetry at the University of Arkansas since 1986.

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