Sail to Great Island

Alan Feldman is professor of English at Framingham State College and for twenty-two years taught the advanced creative writing course at the Radcliffe Seminars, Harvard University. The Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts have awarded him fellowships in poetry. His first book of poems, The Happy Genius, won the 1978 Elliston Book Award.

In A Sail to Great Island a sailor explores what he can learn in isolation with nature, and a landman, rooted in his bonds to family and place, works to get past the grid of his own needs to explore the meaning and value of his connections. The poems begin with clearly defined contexts, but they move quickly to reach beyond the local, gathering weight and momentum as they explore with wit and sympathy the widest implications of their subjects. - Carl Dennis, Felix Pollak Prize judge and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Practical Gods; The first full-length collection in many years by an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, and a host of other journals.