Cain's Punishment

About the Book

These poems reflect on Cain’s punishment for killing Abel, mischief that Jane Austen’s Elizabeth still causes, three swimmers striving to cross Puffer’s Pond, Albert Einstein’s barbershop visit, a murder-suicide and a botched execution, father and sons picking wild blueberries, a snowman built by neighbor children, winter cold and silent snow, nursing home, hospice, and death, feeding quarrelsome birds and judging geese and falcons, love for a wife and tears of a father, ocean play and gardening in old age, honor, vengeance, and other matters light and serious. Cover woodcut, Cain killing Abel, by Albrecht Durer

About the Author

Lewis C. Mainzer is author of Two Wives Ago: Selected Poems (2009), A Rollicking Old-Age Song: New Poems (2012), works in political science, and essays in the Massachusetts Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Yale Review. Professor of political science emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he is former editor of Polity, the journal of the Northeastern Political Science Association.