Zinc Fingers

Peter Meinke is emeritus professor of creative writing at Eckerd College. He has published numerous books of poetry, including Scars, Zinc Fingers, Liquid Paper, and The Contracted World: New & More Selected Poems. Meinke is the recipient of many awards,

Zinc Fingers is Peter Meinke's solid voice at its most recklessly passionate pitch, framed by the eloquent syntax of its silences. Many of these poems have the glow of youth in them, and it is never a pose. When he says 'The nightingale's a feather of a bird,' a single image becomes flight itself, and the weightlessness of time rides a thermal in Meinke's private weather. The optimism he has nurtured throughout his long and distinguished career makes the smallest fragments of the book seem large and constantly unfolding. There is something genuinely childlike yet profoundly philosophical about his approach to the many faces of language—like a mathematician counting on his fingers as he solves the ultimate problem.