Birds

William Benton received his early training in music and worked as a jazz piano player before becoming a writer. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and a number of other magazines. He has published several books of poetry, most recently Backlit, as well as Exchanging Hats, a book on the paintings of Elizabeth Bishop, and Madly, a novel. His newest book is Eye Contact, a book of art writing.

“He tells us something about the paradoxes of love at the same time that he tells us about… art.”—Lilly Wei“High style without grandiloquence.”―John Godfrey“Love, carnal and fated, fills these pages. You can have it but as if in a proverb of the East, you cannot keep it except in brilliant memory. Beautiful, intense, and utterly absorbing.” —James Salter“Very persuasive, disturbing, and written with lovely sentences and small, understated, elegant moments.” —Ann Beattie“William Benton is primarily a poet, and the book [Eye Contact] gradually gains its unique success from the real experience of his lifetime, the coups and crises of marriage and family, its ring of truth resounding from a persisting and expansive source of human authenticity.”―Vyt Bakaitis