Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 146
- Language: English
- Date Published: June 2026
- ISBN 978-1-962847-53-7
Praise
Marble Dust: “Metras employs a lyric tone that evokes the ancient world in modern times….Gary has always been an excellent poet, but this collection feels particularly fine.”—Misfit Magazine
Vanishing Points: Selected as a Must Read Poetry Title by the Mass. Center for the Book. “Readers will be dazzled, I think, by Metras’s many deft and quite moving turns of the phrase….Metras’s diction and tone have the elevated dignity of the best of…Zbigniew Herbert…Czeslaw Miosz…Seamus Heaney.”—The Main Street Rag
Captive in the Here: “Metras, finally, offers the reader a vision of the poet as a creator who transcends time by interpreting and preserving what might otherwise be only mundane experience.” —Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene
White Storm: Selected as a Must Read Poetry Title by the Mass. Center for the Book. “[H]ow words travel off the page to carry us beyond ourselves for others, a legacy of sounds we may savor and hold close in our lives. I highly recommend this collection by a poet young in his upper years.” —David Giannini, Wilderness House Literary Review
The Moon in the Pool: “…is the work of a seasoned poet, a writer accustomed to having his way with words. But there is more to these poems; they make us what we already are. In other words, they tap into our shared humanity.” —The Compulsive Reader
Until There Is Nothing Left: “Metras’ poems are filled with phrases that want to touch and be felt. They testify. Metras is an unpretentious writer who keeps company with readers…In fact, he’s good company. His voice is direct, simple, uncomplaining and democratic.” —Daily Hampshire Gazette
Destiny’s Calendar: “In almost every poem there is a surprising passage of insight….Metras is an authentic, unpretentious moving voice. These are poems to read aloud, linger over, and share with friends.” —Robert Peters, Connecticut Poetry Review.
Excerpt
SPLINTER
Mother’s eyes see only the dark hurt
under pink skin. Her lips straight and silent
like the neighborhood just before dawn.
Here is only that thin, black line intruding.
No fifth grade arithmetic. No laundry.
No division between mother and son
as she dips sewing needle in alcohol,
holds it steady in finger and thumb
while the left hand’s fingers pinch the flesh
white. Even with the deep pain,
it will not do to cry. I watch the needle
enter where the splinter entered.
The needle opens skin, probes beneath
the straight, dark path, snags it, lifts.
She does not take up tweezers.
She bends as if to kiss my finger,
but closes her teeth on the splinter,
draws it out, swipes it with the ball
of her middle finger. We stare
at the tiny slice of the world that yielded
such distress. I walk away healing
and remember the pain.
Author
Gary Metras was the inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Easthampton, Massachusetts, appointed April 2018. He is the author of 9 previous poetry books along with 13 chapbooks. His essays, reviews, and chiefly poems have appeared in hundreds of journals such as America, American Angler, The Bellingham Review, The Boston Review of Books, California Quarterly, Cholla Needles, The Common, Connecticut Poetry Review, English Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry, Poetry East, Poetry Salzburg Review, Yankee and Tears in the Fence (UK). Metras is a past recipient of the Massachusetts Fellowship in Poetry. He was the founder, editor and letterpress printer for 40 years of Adastra Press, which specialized in hand-crafted, limited editions of poetry. He is an avid fly fisher of the local streams and rivers for recreation and inspiration.