And Waking...: Poems

by Kevin Casey

Overview

"Kevin Casey s poems are brief, but not small; short, but not simple. Vividly and deeply attentive to the things of the world, full of rich, resonant description, at times they might be multi-sensory photographs with sounds, smells, and complex feelings built right in. In the New England landscapes of these poems the people are few, but they matter, and so do the places, trees, and animals that the poems so beautifully evoke and transform." -Jeff Gundy, author of Abandoned Homeland

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933964997
Publisher:	Bottom Dog Press
Publication date:	06/09/2016
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	84
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Kevin Casey was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1969. While in high school his family moved to northern Maine on the Canada border to operate a wilderness sporting camp. He has degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the University of Connecticut. He works as a college professor and administrator. He lives in Norther Maine with his wife and three children. His chapbook For the Sake of the Sun (Flutter Press) appeared in 2015. While celebrating the harmony and permanence reflected in the natural world, his work also embraces the inevitable loss and longing that are part of the human condition.

Read an Excerpt

Canoeing at Night



Ribbons of bur-reed lap the keel

as I draw alongside a knot

of sleeping ducks, bills sheathed

in wings, unmoved by the whir

of the circlets that chase

my paddle s blade, untouched

by the stars that shudder

in my wake. And I could

almost stay here with them,

forgo the shore, gliding

to stillness, head bowed,

tucked into the pickerel weed

beneath the weight of all this sky.

Editorial Reviews

There is an ancientness inherent in the poems of Kevin Casey's And Waking Poems. These are memory-laden, incisive meditations on the shadowed world that lives beside us: the silent spaces of a house, a drawer's unseen contents, a cellar made more present by a flood, the rhythm of water against a boat's wooden hull. Casey's work is by turns, reverent, melancholy, and intimate; he lets us place our hands against dirt and stone, on bark, and into silt, feeling what is "...still and deep, beyond the reach / of the frail and glinting finger bones of stars." Agile and silent, these poems are windows on a world. Rachel Adams


This accessible collection is one we take heart and believe in. Yet they are no simple retellings of life in verse, but a world that enacts a spirit of awe, compelling us to read them over again, Casey's gift to us:"the better share of grace'" --Jeffrey Alfier //

There is an ancientness inherent in the poems of Kevin Casey's And Waking Poems. These are memory-laden, incisive meditations on the shadowed world that lives beside us: the silent spaces of a house, a drawer's unseen contents, a cellar made more present by a flood, the rhythm of water against a boat's wooden hull. Casey's work is by turns, reverent, melancholy, and intimate; he lets us place our hands against dirt and stone, on bark, and into silt, feeling what is "...still and deep, beyond the reach / of the frail and glinting finger bones of stars." Agile and silent, these poems are windows on a world. -- Rachel Adams

From the Publisher