Headmaster's Poems

9780839731955

0839731957

"In this compilation of new and selected poems that span thirty years, [Hawley] focuses his penetrating eye upon life's ordinary and unusual occurrences. Like a necklace, the collection combines a series of unique gems strung together to comprise a consequential whole. Hawley's is a world where children in a Sunday school room 'bob like cords. Flap like flags'. A half-asleep man comes upon his wife in their kitchen 'For the first time... holding a baby'. And a lone climber loses his footing and descends into a waterfall that 'gags, then recovers its roar'. Here memory mixes with the immediate, and both come alive: a paved-over prairie was once 'tufted up in wheat-bleached whirls/Like twisted tops of brooms/Brushed over the flat expanse'. Hawley combines meditations, elegies, appreciations, love poems, and light verse, including a very clever rhymed and metrically perfect piece entirely composed of famous lines from Chaucer to Frost. In often brief but potent poems that sometimes approach the quality of aphorisms, Hawley measures the depths and breadth of our world. Like the fish he described in Sunward, the best of these poems 'burst' 'from depths' and stun us 'in an instant's spangled arc/Awash in unbreathable brilliance." -- Andrea Hollander Budy, author of 'The Other Life' and 'House Without a Dreamer'.