The Obstacle Poems and Others

About the Book

This is an old man’s book, not simply because of my age but because I am taking one last basket to market, and I want to fill it with as many good eggs as I can find. The title poem is followed by poems for Isabelle and other members of my incredibly loveable family. The next group of poems is a broad mix, the first having been written in recent years; then poems written over my many decades. They were, at one time or another, considered for a book but rejected. Now all have been revised sufficiently well to satisfy my fussy taste. Obviously, I chose everything here and stand by my pickings just as clear is that, you, dear reader, range over great latitudes with untrammeled feelings. May the muses of poetry bless you.

About the Author

Upon publishing Irreplaceable You and Other Poems in 2006, I considered that my last book, and so it became, although I continued to write poems, as one must and will. (Does anyone ever stop? Sleep, dream, and the rhythms of English speech will not permit it.) But in the spring of my eighty-seventh year (May, June), the poems that were to become the Obstacle Poems came upon me, ever more insistent. I had experienced such an event in one week of March 1988 when I wrote, almost feverishly, most of the poems in my Shaker Suite, published by Touch (l999), and of course, I had to remember Rilke and Duino, the best-known gathering of clustering poems. Something bigger than me told me that I was going to have another book, with Obstacle Poems as the title. This mattered greatly to me, for I was fervently opposed to the Keystone Pipeline. I seriously thought of a poem as an obstacle—the pen is mightier than the sword—and I had to be more than happy (a harmonious marriage of poetry and politics here) when Poetry International published my long poem in February 2015, somewhat before President Obama vetoed the monstrous thing.