Zinc Fingers

Peter Meinke holds the Darden Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University. He has been a professor of literature and creative writing at Eckerd College and has served as writer-in-residence at numerous colleges, including University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the University of Hawaii. Meinke has published seven prior books of poetry, including Scars, Zinc Fingers, and Liquid Paper. He is also the author of six poetry chapbooks and the recipient of numerous awards, including the Olivet Prize, the Paumanok Award, three Poetry Society of America Awards, the Flannery O'Connor Award, and two NEA Fellowships.

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.