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:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Price: $19.00
$19.00
