Long Lens: New & Selected Poems

Winner of the Brockman-Campbell Book Award for 2011

Long Lens represents forty years of Peter Makuck’s work including twenty-five new poems. With precise language, Makuck’s imagery evokes spiritual longing, love, loss, violence and transcendence. His subjects include the aftermath of the 1970 killings at Kent State University; scuba-diving on an offshore shipwreck; flying through a storm in a small plane; rescuing a boy caught in a riptide; and lucid observations of spinner sharks, a gray fox, a spider, and a pelican tangled in a fishing line.

“Peter Makuck sees through the detritus of daily life to what matters … It’s that essence that lives deep down in things, looked for in people, sea- and-landscapes, and creatures, that lifts the quotidian toward the marvelous, and animates this selection of poems from four decades.” —Brendan Galvin

Long Lens (excerpt)

Folding laundry, I can see our clothesline
waving its patches of color like the flag

of a foreign country where I had happily lived
in a small clapboard house surrounded by pines.

I can hear my mother in her strong accent
saying she didn’t want a dryer

even when we could finally afford one—
Our sheets won't smell of trees and sunlight anymore.

© BOA Editions, Ltd 2010

Available editions:
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Price: $19.00