Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 90
- Language: English
- Date Published: October, 2021
- ISBN: 978-1-953252-42-5
Praise
On White Storm:
“There is always something enthralling about Gary Metras’s poetry. Perhaps it is the optimism within the pessimism. Perhaps vice versa. Maybe it is the accessibility to his work. Whatever it is, White Storm is readable and enjoyable, worth a place on your bookshelf.” —Zvi A. Sesling
On The Moon in the Pool:
“Metras…writes in a straightforward, descriptive style, and he often celebrates the natural world, in poems that range from the eight lines of ‘The History of Fishing’ to the lengthy (seven sections each) ‘Seven Stones for Seven Poems’ and ‘The Rain, The Flood.’ The latter work is a meditation on environmental degradation, invoking a flood of biblical proportions that comes as a punishment for abusing the planet…” —Daily Hampshire Gazette
On River Voice:
“Fly fishing love of, as life, a metaphor. Well-wrought and enjoyable even if you have never cast a line.” —Misfit Magazine
Excerpt
LINT
It doesn’t bother me to have
lint in the bottoms of pant pockets;
it gives the hands something to do,
especially since I no longer hold
shovel, hod, or hammer
in the daylight hours of labor
and haven’t, in fact, done so
in fifty-five years. A long time
to be picking lint from pockets.
Perhaps even long enough to have
gathered sacks full of lint
that could have been put
to good use, maybe spun into yarn
to knit a sweater for my wife’s
Christmas present, or strong thread
woven into a tweedy jacket.
Imagine entering my classroom
in a jacket made from lint.
Who would believe it?
Yet there are stranger things—
the son of a bricklayer with hands
so smooth they’re only fit
for picking lint.
Author
Gary Metras is the author of eight books of poetry along with thirteen chapbooks. His White Storm (Presa Press, 2018) was selected as a Must Read title in the Massachusetts Books of the Year Program. His essays, reviews, and chiefly poems have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies since the 1970s, including America, American Life in Poetry, Boston Review of Books, California Quarterly, The Common, Connecticut Poetry Review, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Hawai’i Pacific Review, New England Watershed, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry, Poetry East, Poetry Salzburg Review, San Antonio Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Tears in the Fence, (UK) and Visiting Frost: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Robert Frost (Iowa). A master letterpress printer, he founded and edited Adastra Press for forty years, releasing numerous fine press poetry limited editions. He lives in Easthampton, Massachusetts, where, in April 2018, he was appointed as the city’s inaugural Poet Laureate.