You’ve published many books. What distinguishes this one?
Good question! Pagan Sky: New and Selected Poems 2000-2025 includes poems from six previous books, all published since Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (Boa Editions, 2001). Among the selections are poems chosen for three Pushcart Prize anthologies, a poem selected for Best American Poetry, poems from Darling Vulgarity (Boa 2006), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and poems that have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, and The Georgia Review. Also included in Pagan Sky are more than two dozen new poems. One critic has written, “[T]he consistency of his work over the past thirty years has contributed greatly to American letters, and his unique voice within the poetry world illuminates, with precision and clarity, the intricate nature of the human condition” (American Book Review). I hope readers might agree with such a generous assessment.
What’s the book about?
“The truth is that poets are human beings, and that what a poet has to say about his work is often far from being the most illuminating word on the subject.” That’s Jung. I might say that my reading in American literature has influenced my work, and that, of our 19th century writers, I lean more toward Hawthorne and Melville and Poe than I do toward Whitman and Thoreau and Emerson. I remain interested in the nuances of desire, the attractions of sin and transgression, spiritual recklessness, the consolations of love and mercy, and the sensuous pleasures of language. Caravaggio, Pavese, Balthus, and Sappho, as well as Macy Gray, Sly and the Family Stone, Peter Orlovsky, and Gwendolyn Brooks appear in these poems. Brooklyn, Greece, Romania, and the Dominican Republic are among their locales. I hope that the poems are accessible, interesting, and deeply affective.
