Leaf, Sunlight, Asphalt

Ichigo ichie ("one time, one meeting"), a motto associated with the Japanese tea ceremony, enjoins the host and guests in the tea hut to treat each encounter as unprecedented and unrepeatable. Infused with that conviction, the poems of Ben Howard's sixth collection bring an exact and ceremonial attention to the things of this world. Whether the object of attention be a red-twig dogwood, Dublin in July, or the "lucid silence" envisioned by Thomas Merton, these poems speak in a language of open awareness and a voice of uncommon grace.

A native of eastern Iowa, Ben Howard is the author of The Pressed Melodeon: Essays on Modern Irish Writing (Story Line Press, 1996), the verse novella Midcentury (Salmon, 1997), and four previous collections of poems, most recently Dark Pool (Salmon, 2004) and Leaf, Sunlight, Asphalt (Salmon, 2009). He has received numerous awards, including the Milton Dorfman Prize in Poetry and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is Professor of English Emeritus at Alfred University.