Late at Night in the Rowboat

Donald Junkins is a winner of the New Letters poetry award, and has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants. His poems have appeared in nine anthologies including American Anthology/2 (selected by Anne Sexton) and The New Yorker Book of Poems. Major reviews of his poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Sewanee Review, and The New York Times Book Review. Junkins' translation of Euripides' Andromache appears in the Penn Greek Drama Series, and he translated with Amiya Chakravarty, A Tagore Reader. His own poems have been translated into French, Ukrainian, and Chinese. He lives in Deerfield, Massachusetts with his wife, Kaimei Zheng, with whom he has translated a volume of Li Bai's (Li Po) poems. His sixteen line definition of a New Englander appears in John Murray's A Gentleman Publisher's Commonplace Book. Junkins is the poetry editor of the North Dakota Quarterly.

In these new poems, Donald Junkins again gives his readers the remarkable constructs of precision and voice and craft they have come to expect from him. His formal poise and meditative music convey the reader through highly particularized places and times to numinous Place and Time, always lingering at the crossroads of landscape and inscape. Retracing paths of memory, Junkins leads his readers toward the harbor of true placidity where, through the larger motions of the heart, we stand a chance of loving well the world. In these poems there may be "homesickness"--or mal du pays, for many homes, many places, many countries, many times, but they will have no truck with mere nostalgia, that sentimental drive to surrender the present to the past. What the poet creates brilliantly here is the essential poetic archeology, sifting the ruins of the past to make sense of the present, and thus an imaginable future. Readers will discover in these landscapes that are at once achingly real and hauntingly magical, both loss and grace, and renewals that redeem remorse and regret. With something very much like prayerful reverence for exactitude and truth, these poems do what Bergson says art must do--they bring us into our own presence." - H. R.Stoneback