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Poetry and Earth – Always

Posted in Ecopoetry, tagged Ann Deagon, David Manning, Earth Day 2026, Ecopoetry, Fred Chappell, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poets, Patricia Crittenden, Patricia Hooper, Peter Makuck, poetry, Richard Widerkehr, Southern writing on May 1, 2026| 4 Comments »

Native Southern Wildflower – Geranium maculatum

[ poems by Fred Chappell, Patricia Crittenden, Patricia Hooper, Richard Widerkehr,

Ann Deagon, Peter Makuck, David Manning ]

Forever Mountain

J.T.Chappell, 1912-1978

Now a lofty smoke has cleansed my vision.

I see my father has gone to climb

Lightly the Pisgah slope, taking the time

He’s got a world of, making spry headway

In the fresh green mornings, stretching out

Noontimes in the groves of beech and maple.

He has cut a walking stick of second-growth hickory

And through the amber afternoon he measures

Its shadow and his own shadow on a sunny rock.

Not marking the hour, but observing

The quality of light come over him.

He is alone, except what voices out of time

Swarm to his head like bees to the bee-tree crown,

The voices of former life as indistinct as heat.

By the clear trout pool he builds his fire at twilight,

And in the night a granary of stars

Rises in the water and spreads from edge to edge.

He sleeps, to dream the tossing dream

Of the horses of pine trees, their shoulders

Twisting like silk ribbon in the breeze.

He rises glad and early and goes his way,

Taking by plateaus the mountain that possesses him.

My vision blurs blue with distance,

I see no more.

Forever Mountain has become a cloud

That light turns gold, that wind dislimns.

This is continually a prayer.

Fred Chappell (1936-2024)

from Source, LSU Press (1985), and collected in The Fred Chappell Reader, St. Martin’s Press (1987)

selected by Bill Griffin

This was the first contemporary poem I read as I returned to poetry in my forties. I have read it again and again since then, as well as most everything else Fred has written. This, along with the poem Hymn by A R Ammons, was also the inspiration for me to imagine I might take up the pen and write as well. Even more today than all those decades ago, I am captured by this vision of heaven, the afterlife, as a campfire at night with a granary of stars, rising trout, and a new mountain to climb each morning. May it be so.

— Bill

❀ ✿ ✾ ❁

We Set Out Together

My daughter and me,

up an old mountain road through the late autumn trees.

We’d agreed she’d climb to the peak on her own and, on her way back,

find me where I’d wait among bright colored leaves.

But the leaves are gone, fallen back to the earth.

We’ve come too late.

We pause near the last of the asters; that lets me keep up.

But soon I begin to tire.

As we pass the first bench, I’m still with her.

Then, before the second, I say, “You go on ahead,”

as we had agreed.

She walks up the mountain, as I rest on the downside,

glad not to be chasing life’s peaks anymore.

This is how it goes, isn’t it?

You carry your children until they can toddle.

But, when you finally could walk together, they’re too busy.

Now, as you grow old, they walk ahead

and you see them receding as they round the bend.

I reach the second bench alone and walk on

to an opening in the woods with a long view across a deep stream-cut hollow.

I stand and look.

The ravine is too deep to cross; can three decades be bridged?

Will she pass or has she gone so far ahead that I won’t see her?

Her footsteps die out, replaced by a faint breeze whispering among the dry leaves,

then the buzz of a bee on a few faded flowers,

then nothing.

I wait.

I wait some more.

I wait as long as hope can hold on and then a bit longer,

then I turn back to the second bench.

It’s all agreed; she will come back

and I will be here – for a while.

Life’s path is universal, but uniquely trod

rising briefly from earth, then disappearing whence it came.

Is it better to live and die, as the forest does, without foresight?

She thinks the future is long and she knows she will return.

But I know time is short and fickle – like the first hard frost.

Will she come back in time?

Patricia Crittenden

Thank you, Pat, for sharing this lovely poem. It weaves between observation and musing, between presence and anticipation, even between joy and grief, just like a mountain path weaves up the ridge and down again. We may say we are glad that we no longer have to chase life’s peaks, but then regret swells as we watch life’s treasure recede. There are so many endings here, and so many hopes that what we hold dear may not end altogether. May each of us discover that it is never too late.

— Bill

Autumn Sasssafras

❀ ✿ ✾ ❁

Sightings

The world leafs out again, the willow first

and then the river birches near the road

we’re driving down, you in your car seat watching,

for hawks or smaller birds returning home.

Two years have passed since you could walk or stand

alone. The winter-damaged fields are sown,

and there, along the ridge, unraveling,

spirals of song birds, drifts of dogwood trees,

restored to blossom, beauty that breaks the heart.

And you whose spinal cord could not be healed:

you’re lowering the window, looking up

at miles of wings, your face alive with joy.

Patricia Hooper

from her fifth book, A Necessary Persistence

selected by Richard Widerkehr

Hooper makes us feel connected to this “annual miracle” of April, as E. Dickinson called it. Clear images, strong feeling—a grandson’s wonder, the speaker’s joy and gratitude—this poem is a gift to the reader. (I wrote a review of A Necessary Persistence for Aquifer a few years ago.)

— Richard

✾

In The Forest, There Are Stars

Thick green-black branches can’t hide them,

whistling through cedar and fir trees. You’ve seen

one star drop as if torn from the forest.

Here stars jostle each other, falling toward you—

you forget what you were and how you came here.

Maybe, by day on the road to islands,

can you remember the white edges

of rooftops, how the forest rose to meet you?

Here sword ferns jut from the hillsides.

High fern-like branches fan themselves downward,

and stars soak you with their cold radiance.

The stars that were small and cold

in the sky are still small and cold. The branches

lift about them, hissing lightly.

Richard Widerkehr

from Missing The Owl (Shanti Arts Publications), first published in Sweet Tree Review and then reprinted in Adventures Northwest

❀ ✿ ✾ ❁

. .

Augury

Tonight my father cupped his hands and blew

into their hollow sphere and brought to life

the long wild resonant cry

of country boyhood, owl-haunted evenings

and the dark modulations of distant hounds,

fluttered his fingers throbbing into memory

those sobbing whistles hunting down the rails

my childhood dreaming in the restless city.

And as my children wondered cupping their hands

to capture that primeval mimicry

of all that haunts and heightens our precarious sense

of living rooted in immemorial time,

I saw my father new, and shared his knowing

the secret of our give and take of breath:

live long enough to know that we are dying,

hand on with tenderness and dignity

our resonant art

the long learned call

of trumpeter man.

Ann Deagon (1930-2024)

collected in Word and Witness: 100 years of North Carolina Poetry, Carolina Academic Press, Durham NC (1999)

selected by Bill Griffin

“The secret of our give and take of breath:” the mimicry of primeval haunts whispers that secret into our soul, that we share these short lives with every creature that snuffles, caws, and swims, with every waving tree and scented flower. What call, what whistle will we hear that can draw us back together into one circle?

In her bio, Ann Deagon once remarked that she didn’t begin writing until she was forty, “when that three-headed dog love death and poetry took me in its teeth and shook me.” She taught Classics at Guilford College and was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellowship, among many other honors during her life.

— Bill

❀ ✿ ✾ ❁

My Son Draws an Apple Tree

I watch it grow

at the end of his dimpled hand

rooted in white paper.

The strokes are fast

and careless, as if the hand

has little time.

Quick black trunk,

a green crown and in the white

air all by itself

a red splotch,

an apple face with a frown

that is his

he gravely says

looking up at me — the stiffening

branch he falls from.

Peter Makuck (1940-1923)

selected by Bill Griffin

Some poems we return to only to discover that at each visit they bestow upon us a different benediction. Which simply makes sense, since we are a different person each time we read the lines. I am the tree bent and stiffening. I pray only this, that for those I love and for all the earth as well that not all innocence and purity may be lost. Thank you, Peter, for continuing to inspire.

— Bill

❀ ✿ ✾ ❁

The Dance

I say yes to the tulip tree

dropping its cups of flowers,

golden and green

and to the derelict ailanthus

breaker of concrete sidewalks

and to the sumac with its cones of fire.

Yes to the white-tails that float

their magic, then vanish

far into the woods’ deep green

and to the mallard pair, duck and drake

that waddle up from Crabtree Creek

and to the earthworms

they clear from our driveway.

Yes to the turtle, the red slider

that spring calls from the creek

to wandering, the one I rescued

from a storm-drain and gave my blessing to.

And yes to that damn beaver

that cut down the giant beech

near the stream, my favorite tree

in the wetland, and to the trees

he left behind.

Yes to the night’s extravagance of stars,

to Vega’s frozen light, the lyre of the stars

and to the southern cross

and multitudes of strange lights

I cannot see, much less name, so far below

the horizon over Patagonia

all the way down to the pole.

And yes to the blessing of day and night,

mates following each other

and to the contentment each brings

in its own way, bright, then silent dark.

Because none of these I can keep.

They are not mine, and I cannot stop

the music in the middle of the dance.

So yes to this morning rain carrying

yesterday away.

David Treadway Manning (1928-2021)

from Sailing the Bright Stream: New & Selected Poems, Press 53, Winston-Salem NC (2020)

selected by Bill Griffin

Thank you, Dave for years of friendship. For minds that open and expand, always. For a thousand true laughs, the bright and knowing ones and the wicked ones. For this poem, its music in which you and I will continue to live.

— Bill

❀ ✿ ✾ ❁

Life is not so much a matter of discovering something new as it is a matter of rediscovering what has always been present.

— W. Ralph Ward, Jr.

There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it.

— Minnie Aumonier

Thank you for celebrating the month of April with International Earth Day (April 22) and National Poetry Month, and for continuing the celebration. And thank you, Readers, who have selected poems to share that connect us to our planet and each other. EVERY DAY is EARTH DAY!

And thanks always to camping buddy Mike Barnett, who keeps me supplied with the unending delights of quotations from the spirit of Nature.

❁

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— Bill

❀ ✿ ✾ ❁

2016-10-17 Doughton Park Tree

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Boyanimal

Posted in family, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged Bill Griffin, Don Ball, imagery, Janis Harrington, nature photography, NC Poets, Pam Baggett, Peter Makuck, poetry, Southern writing, Tar River Poetry on February 16, 2024| 6 Comments »

[with 3 poems from Tar River Poetry]

Submersible

+++ “Red Sky at Morning”

++++++ – for Peter Makuck

All day and into the evening sullen rain has bucketed dow upon us,

and I think of Peter and the blue-black coastal squalls purpling seaward.

Ignoring heavy weather is what natives do on Emerald Isle. Years ago

I failed to talk him and Phyllis into fleeing Hurricane Florence, a monster

storm grinding on Wilmington. Likewise, I used to remind my rother

at Kitty Hawk, half-joking, that he lived in the middle of the god-damned

Atlantic Ocean. He never listened either – even after his son refused

evacuation from Hurricane Isobel and almost drowned inside their cottage

with his loyal dog and bobbing bamboo furniture. Tenaciously, Peter and

Phyllis have been anchored to their apartment for years, weathering cancer

treatments and the Pandemic. Finally – like my father decades ago –

Peter had had enough of chemo, remission, drug cocktails and radiation,

so six weeks back he stopped. Meanwhile the world obsesses over five men

trapped in the submersible Titan, its only hatch bolted from the outside and

the seven ways it’s supposed to shed weight and resurface from its great drop

down to Titanic’s ghost spines. The one porthole is small. They’re out of air.

Peter too has begun a long descent through the murky waters of memory,

morphine, and goodby to land finally (I hope) upon the soft silt of forever.

Everyone’s half-waiting for the last storm to fade and for Peter – teacher, poet,

and sailor – to resurface and note with delight, again, a red sky at night.

Don Ball

from Tar River Poetry, Volume 63 Number 1, Fall 2023, Greenville NC.

❦ ❦ ❦

As soon as he hops from the car he’s Tyrannosaurus, miniature dangling forelegs, ferocious jaw gaping as he swivels his head side to side, Linda and me his prey. While we wait for food Chameleon appears, thin compressed lips, deliberate robot-like ratcheting gait, front digits at right angles all asplay. Later we interrupt our walk for him to climb the big rock, Gila Monster, but then he elongates his body along a fissure and becomes Chuckwalla.

Boys are animals. This boy, though, is the master of animals. Not only in transforming himself one into another but also in the thousand and one details he can tell us about their lives and characteristics. We imagine his kindergarten teacher’s eyebrows rising higher and higher at the revelations he pours forth. And what is the best place to really mix it up with animals? Besides, that is, the back yard – bird feeders, bunnies, snakes, hens – and walks along the greenway – deer, skinks, herons, eagles? Well, of course the North Carolina Zoological Park!

This is the second straight year we’ve spent my birthday at the Zoo with Bert. And with about a thousand other boys and girls of every possible age, shape, size, and color. Come to the Zoo and see the wild children! What other place can keep kids walking for hours and miles with minimal meltdowns? (And what other place features Polar Bear pee and Gorilla poop, fascinating stuff.) Just pack plenty of snacks and you won’t hear the first whine. And while we adults are rewarded minute by minute with Bert’s company, it’s only fair to end the day with one final reward for him at the gift shop. Another addition to the home menagerie. Next time we’re together, I’ll be sure to keep my fingers to myself when Boy Snapping Turtle meets me at the door.

❦ ❦ ❦

The Dead

We want to button them to us,

wear them like clothes. We want

to savor our morning café au lait

with them, hold yoga poses,

walk dogs, skateboard, eat sushi,

rake leaves, stream movies, tango

dribble basketballs with them.

We want them to ride beside us,

windows down, singing

along with our favorite playlists.

We want to tuck them in books

to mark our place, jingle them

in our pockets, lucky coins,

hook them over our arms

like umbrellas to keep us dry.

Coming home at night, we want

the porchlight’s yellow halo

to mean they’re waiting up.

As our key turns the lock,

we pray they’ll call out to us

from the empty rooms

of our dark house.

Janis Harrington

from Tar River Poetry, Volume 63 Number 1, Fall 2023, Greenville NC.

❦ ❦ ❦

I first immersed myself in Peter Makuck’s poetry when I was poet-in-residence at the NC Zoo in 2012. I was working on the Poetry of Conservation project, selecting poems by North Carolina writers that might be displayed in the park, and I also published daily posts of my observations (spending all day every day in the Zoo – it doesn’t get better than that!). In my very first post I featured Peter’s poem, My Son Draws an Apple Tree, a beautifully simple poem that cuts to the truth of the bittersweet relationship between father and son. Peter’s collection in which the poem appears, Long Lens, is filled with generous, haunting, contemplative recollections and themes.

Peter Makuck founded Tar River Poetry and served as its editor for decades during his tenure at East Carolina University. The current issue arrived this week [vol 63, nr 1, fall 2023] and is dedicated to him – he died last year at the age of 83. Peter inspired me through his writing but equally through his generosity and friendship. Somehow we struck up an email correspondence through the years, first about poetry, then about the NC coast, nature sightings, just stuff we discovered we had in common. Even when wearing his editor’s hat – and I have accumulated more rejections than acceptances from him and Luke Whisnant, the current editor – he was never anything but encouraging and giving of himself. He would have liked me to believe that I, even I, could write poetry as worthy as his own.

❦

Tar River Poetry is a journal of national stature and reputation, but the three poems I’ve featured today are all by North Carolina writers who appear in this current issue (the wonderful poem One Year Old by Rebecca Baggett is also in this issue but space constraints etc.). Check out TRP and join me in subscribing HERE

Long Lens by Peter Makuck is available HERE. Learn more about Peter and his other books HERE

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Picking Up Trash with My Sister

on Crab Orchard Road

She plunges a foot into the dry ditch,

tosses cans, plastic bottles, empty

cigarette packs onto the gravel road

so we can sort them into garbage

and recycling. As she works she asks,

Is this poison ivy? Is this?, trusting me

to protect her as I’ve trusted her since my beginning,

older sister in pictures at ages five and three,

reading to me as we sit on the sofa,

feet sticking straight out, book open in her lap,

pink cat’s eye classes she pushed with one finger

back up her nose.

And later, at nine and eleven, trying

to sooth with the only stories that made sense:

we’re fleeing the potato famine in Ireland

or Nazis coming to take us away

that morning we heaped dolls into blankets,

shoved clothes into flowered suitcases, fearing

each floorboard creak might be our father

come home to carry out night’s drunken threat

to shoot our mother.

My sister stomps a beer can flat,

drops it in her bag, slips a Styrofoam cup

into mine. Who would do this? she says,

shaking her head, pushing dark purple glasses

with one finger back up her nose. She twists the lid

from a water bottle, pours the last sip

over the roots of a wilted aster

Pam Baggett

from Tar River Poetry, Volume 63 Number 1, Fall 2023, Greenville NC.

❦ ❦ ❦

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Chain

Posted in Ecopoetry, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged A. R. Ammons, Bill Griffin, ecology, Ecopoetry, imagery, Julie Suk, nature, nature photography, nature poetry, NC Poetry Society, NC Poets, NCPS, Peter Makuck, poetry, Southern writing, Word and Witness on February 24, 2023| 15 Comments »

[poems from Word and Witness: A. R. Ammons, Julie Suk, Peter Makuck]

Carnage ensues at the table while I make coffee. As all the other animals look on in abject silence, large plush Starfish (carnivore, you know) has captured Baby Chick and is eating him with authentic suck-the-juice-right-out-of-you sound effects.

I remark that I’m going to be sad to miss little yellow Chicky. My grandson looks up, all innocence, and simply reminds me, “That’s just the way the food chain works.”

So it must be. Nine years before the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Alfred Lord Tennyson had already warned us (“she” being Nature, “types” being species):

. . .
She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.

‘Thou makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death:
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more.’ And he, shall he,

Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law–
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed –

Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal’d within the iron hills?

+++++ from In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850)

Shall we weep for Baby Chick? For the extinctions accelerating around us? For ourselves, our loss? A few years back I was leading a group of Junior Highs on a nature walk when we spotted a marvelously large spider shuffling along the path ahead of us. When we reached it, though, we found it was not the legs of the spider that were walking but the legs of the pint-sized wasp that had stung and paralyzed it and now dragged it to a favorable spot for egg laying. In an instant the spider transformed from an object of fear and loathing to a spike of compassion in our hearts.

This week a very talkative red shouldered hawk is haunting the woods out back. No coincidence: that’s where the bird feeders hang. We hope he’s eyeing the squirrels – there are more than enough squirrels, eat all you want Sir Hawk. And the mice that come for the seeds dropped to the ground from the feeders, and then store them in our basement, yes, eat them, too. But please, not the cute chipmunk who hides in the ivy or the finches we love. Alas, I guess we don’t get to choose. That’s just how the food chain works.

But wait – do all our choices come to nothing? Our love, our suffering of countless ills, our battles for the True and Just – is the end of all these to be blown to desert dust? Can’t we choose to engage with embattled Nature? Can we reduce our relentless consumption of the planet, choose leaders of vision and intelligence, make peace with our brothers and sisters? How lengthy shall I extend this list? Shall we abandon hope and just accept our place in the food chain while the warming earth devours us?

If a spider can inspire a moment of compassion in a 13-year old, I will have to accede that there may yet be hope for our species.

❦ ❦ ❦

The Yucca Moth

++ The yucca clump
is blooming,
++ tall sturdy spears
spangling into bells of light,
++ green
in the white blooms
++ faint as a memory of mint.

I raid
++ a bloom,
spread the hung petals out,
++ and, surprised he is not
a bloom-part, find
++ a moth inside, the exact color,
the bloom his daylight port or cove:

though time comes
++ and goes and troubles
are unlessened,
++ the yucca is lifting temples
of bloom: from the night
++ of our dark flights, can
we go in to heal, live
++ out in white-green shade
the radiant, white, hanging day?

A. R. Ammons
collected in Word and Witness: 100 years of North Carolina Poetry, Carolina Academic Press, © 1999 North Carolina Poetry Society

❦ ❦ ❦

This week a friend asked me to send him the table of contents of Word and Witness for a project on biodiversity he’s considering The book was published by the North Carolina Poetry Society in 1999 and edited by Sally Buckner with an afterword by Fred Chappell, who was NC Poet Laureate at the time. It spans the full 20th Century of North Carolina poetry and poets, and as I was scanning the TOC to email my friend a PDF, I re-discovered the names of so many folks who have inspired and befriended me over the last two decades.

Poetry continues to thrive in “the writingest state.” Word and Witness is 261 pages; it would be a real challenge to prepare Volume II for just the first quarter of the 21st Century and limit it to that length. I believe it is still possible to purchase a copy from Carolina Academic Press. You need to get yourself one.

❦ ❦ ❦

Waiting for the Storyteller

Once more we wait for the storyteller
to step into the margin and reveal intentions:
why the first letter flowered,
spiraling down the page with intricate designs,
the hand translating what the tongue began.

Clues drop, mostly forgotten,
so on and so on stacked like bricks,
crumbling when we look back,
a voice once close now a stranger.

All through the book we wild-guess the villain,
so deceived by this one or that
we look for reprieve, a surprise ending,
the page turning to a house in the woods,
dogs locked up, gun put a way.

In the still forest of words,
where the hidden appears in its season,
hills darken and move in.
Like lean horses that have rocked a long way home,
they circle the pool of our hands.
A deer riffles through leaves, then a bird
sings begin again, begin again.

Julie Suk
collected in Word and Witness: 100 years of North Carolina Poetry, Carolina Academic Press, © 1999 North Carolina Poetry Society

❦ ❦ ❦

Dogwood Again

Home from college, I’d leave my reading,
climb the hill through trees behind the house,
listen to a rough wind suffer through
new leaves and, too aware of myself, ask why?

The answer could have been stone wall,
wind or some other words. In April, our house
lived in the light of those first white petals
and now I think more about hows than whys –

How, whenever we fished at Pond Meadow,
my father dug a small one up, carefully
wrapped the rootball in burlap, and trucked it
home until our hard blazed white all around,

and how, at Easter, those nighttime blossoms
seemed like hundred of fluttering white wings.
Again that tree goes into the dark loaded
with envy, those leaves full of light not fading.

And this morning, a fogbright air presses
against the blank white pane and would have us
see the way mist burns from within, shimmers,
slowly parts, and flares upon an even whiter tree,

tinged now with orange, and how a soft fire
runs to the farthest cluster of cross-like petals,
each haloed with clear air, finely revealed.

Peter Makuck
collected in Word and Witness: 100 years of North Carolina Poetry, Carolina Academic Press, © 1999 North Carolina Poetry Society

❦ ❦ ❦

Bios adapted in part from Word and Witness:

After growing up on a tobacco farm near Whiteville, A. R. Ammons (1926-2001) received a degree from Wake Forest College, and served as an elementary school principal, but he lived most of his adult life outside his native state. His interest in writing developed during long hours aboard ship when he served a term of duty with the Navy. In 1964 he joined the faculty at Cornell University, where he was ultimately Goldwin Smith Professor of English. Among his many honors are the Bollingen Prize, the national Book award (twice), the MacArthur Fellowship, and the 1998 Tanning Prize from the Academy of American Poets.

A native of Alabama, Julie Suk (b. 1924) has lived for many years in Charlotte, where she worked in a nature museum. In addition to authoring six volumes of her own poetry, she has co-edited (with Anne Newman) Bear Crossings: An Anthology of North American Poets. Her collection The Angel of Obsession won the 1991 University of Arkansas national poetry competition, and in 1993 she won the Bess Hokin Prize given by Poetry magazine. In 2004 Julie received the Irene Blair Honeycutt Lifetime Achievement Award from Central Piedmont Community College; her book The Dark Takes Aim won the 2003 North Carolina Poetry Society’s Brockman-Campbell Book Award and The Oscar Arnold Young Award from The Poetry Council of North Carolina.

Among previous occupations, Peter Makuck (b. 1940) lists, “truck driver, painter, mechanic,” but he is best known as writer and as Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences at East Carolina University. Pilgrims won the Zoe Kincaid Brockman Award for the best book of poems by a North Carolinian in 1989. In 2010 Long Lens: New & Selected Poems was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. In addition to his eight collections of poetry, he has published numerous short stories and essays. Peter has received the International Poetry Forum’s Charity Randall Citation; a Connecticut native, he has been a Fulbright Lecturer at the Universite de Soavoie, Chambery, France. He founded Tar River Poetry in 1978 and served as editor until 2006.

❦ ❦ ❦