- Paperback: 80 pages
- Publisher: WordTech Communications (July 1, 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1933456353
- ISBN-13: 978-1933456355
- To purchase, click HERE.
In the graceful lyrics of Stephen Cushman’s Heart Island, no heart is truly an island: all are interconnected. The human and natural environments of Cushman’s world gather together in resonant and affectionate poems that nonetheless resist an easy nostalgia. Structured around a sequence of poems to the individual months of the year, this book recalls the ancient genre of calendrical poetry at the same time that its attention to months suggests an elegiac homage to patterns of weather, both inner and outer, and to the integrities of seasons that may not last much longer as the earth continues to warm.
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Reviews
“Stephen Cushman is a poet obsessed with the calendar. His poems mark time. Personal and historic anniversaries and other landmark passages (weddings, deaths, births, diurnal and nocturnal motions, the months—his collection Heart Island, for instance, takes as its backbone 12 poems apostrophizing each of the months of the zodiac—the seasons, ‘sacred’ thresholds of all sorts) provide the occasion for poetic musings that, though they may begin with noting or honoring a pattern in nature or human behavior, always move the reader into unexpected and provocative territory.” — Chronicle of Higher Education
Stephen Cushman 