Lifelines

Born 1936 in New York City, Robin Magowan received a BA from Harvard, MA from Columbia, and a PhD in comparative literature from Yale. During the 1960s, he taught at the University of Washington and the University of California at Berkeley. He moved to France in 1973, then to England in 1978, where in 1986 he founded the transatlantic review Margin, which he edited until 1990. The author of ten books of poetry, Magowan has also published a translation of Michaux's Ecuador; Narcissus and Orpheus, a study of the modern pastoral narrative; two collections of travel writing, And Other Voyages and Fabled Cities: Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva; and two books on bicycle racing. He currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico where he copes with a large rock garden.

"In Lifelines, his latest collection, Robin Magowan has composed a rich medley of broad and deep practical knowledge of the natural world, as well as his anchored knowledge of his own always alert expansive life in the natural and the human world. In attitude, Magowan’s poems are willing again and again—with narrative poise or a haiku’s memorably striking delicacy—to 'march into late night’s surprises: / honey in a glass / rain sifting down.'For Magowan, both eye and mind are organs of his own restless love affair—at once sexual and intellectual—with the world, and I love how his tirelessly far-flung mind and restless kinetic eye give all he encounters its own distinct lyrical shimmer.Enough to say that Lifelines offers its readers the complex satisfaction of riches (human, natural, personal, or impersonal) rendered with refined lyrical tact into cherished possessions. As with the Romantic poets themselves, Magowan has a bracing capacity for imaginative identification: one minute rejoicing in the mysterious spectacle of cranes dancing, at another it’s the touching sight of grebes 'gathering the glisten where the moon is salt.' In a word, then, there are so many treats here that all a grateful reader can do is thank the poet who says, “come in, enjoy the feast."—Eamon Grennan, author of Plainchant