These poems by award-winning author Dennis Hathaway are meditations on life and death through a variety of perspectives. In the title poem, a man reading about shipwrecked sailors driven to cannabilism is led to reflect on a particularly intense time of his youth. In The Promised Land, the boundless optimism of youth is captured in the observations of a young man escaping the Midwest for California, while Southern California (Revised) paints a disturbing picture of that iconic place’s future. In Documents of War and The Harrying of the North, official documents and a famous tapestry are used to illustrate the distance most of us maintain from the grim realities of war. The spectacles of natural worlds both large and small are lyrically evoked in River of Wind and Fauna, while the abiding love between a man and his wife is the subject of The Path, The Philosophy of Love and several other poems that combine sharp observation of the everyday details of life with flights of imagination. But despite the seriousness of subject matter, many of the 25 poems in this collection have an ample seasoning of humor, from the overt in Money and Queen of Spades” to the more subtle in Memory and Santa Inez.
