Inland Seas – serie

This book represents a mental construct of salvation. It portrays the individual way in which a person saves the psyche. Fifth Season is an amalgamation of losses transformed into a state of serenity for the individual. The fifth season is that imaginary place where time becomes less relevant, where the poet attempts to make sense of the tangible world around him. The fifth season represents a unique path, one which may not be traveled twice. It is the imaginary construct of a season of hope.

In James Armstrong’s pellucid poetry the drifting of autumn leaves shares space with the baroque architecture of nineteenth century England. A woman peruses a book of pharmaceuticals in a coffee shop looking for hints of happiness. And a naked woman wearing hip boots stares out of the 1940s in a photograph hung in a Michigan bar. Twilight is always moving the shadows of our urban lives out toward the country, our inherited past, where a deer or a heron waits like an angel glimpsed through the fog. Armstrong’s poems elucidate the mystery and beauty of borders– temporal and historical, as well as geographical– while his pastoral sensibility floods our senses with images of the natural world, seemingly stopping time, edifying us, and helping us–for a few moments anyway–to transcend our enervated contemporary lives. Reading this book is like diving into a deep lake. It cleanses the soul.

Jim Daniels' collection bears witness to a life both mis- and well-spent: to the family, remembered and new; to the melancholy pull of drugs and casual sex; to growing up; and to the only tenable way of growing old, which is to embrace every small joy even as one laments its brevity. Indeed, Night with Drive-By Shooting Stars rages not against the dying of light but the dying fall itself—against poetic and existential complacency. "Louder, kids," says Daniels in the beautiful "Cold Seed:" "daddy’s dying."

Little Low Heaven describes a world of isolation and beauty, art and prophecy, loss and yearning. In his tender yet terrible reading of the human condition, Anthony Butts has become a poet of pain and sorrow and, finally, of the barest budding of hope.