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by James Longenbach (Author)
Standing on the shore, preparing to journey into the unknown, James Longenbach wrote these final poems with astonishing courage and clarity. Seafarer opens with a gorgeous sequence in which the poet looks down on his life from above, as if he's already left it behind. With prophetic perception, Longenbach reflects on the encroaching tide of mortality through myth and memory. This volume unites Seafarer with Forever (2021) and the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Earthling (2017); the three works have a powerful symmetry in their recognition of the ordinary, extraordinary, and precarious experiences of love and loss.
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Praise for James Longenbach
"[James Longenbach's poems] wash over you like waves, lift you up and set you down back at the beginning of your life. . . . Longenbach's lucid poems echo across decades, bound for poetry's future."
-- Rob Schlegel, author of Childcare
"A wrenchingly personal account of memory, sorrow, and profound beauty, rendered in lyric poetry. . . . [M]ortality shadows every erotic or tender gesture."
-- David Baker, author of Whale Fall
"[Evoking] the vivid dailiness of domestic life . . . and the specificity and poignance of what feels like actual memories . . . these lyrics are intimately personal, achingly autobiographical."
-- Langdon Hammer, American Scholar
"[James Longenbach's poems] enact with such precision the very problem they pronounce: that the pleasure of the language we read can, like memory, only approach the lives we actually live. Line by line, the poems' likelihood to narrate, repeat, or gorgeously veer describes what it is to love and simultaneously feel oneself inside the grandiosity of time."
-- Sally Keith, author of River House
