James Longenbach

Standing on the shore, preparing to journey into the unknown, James Longenbach wrote these final poems with astonishing courage and clarity. Seafarer opens with a gorgeous sequence in which the poet looks down on his life from above, as if he's already left it behind. With prophetic perception, Longenbach reflects on the encroaching tide of mortality through myth and memory....

Praised for a voice with "the crystalline, transformative, pure pitch of a lyric poet" (Ilya Kaminsky), James Longenbach explores a life lived with the knowledge of its end in his sixth collection. These luminous, lyrical poems pose a question: Why did this poet once live as if he would live forever? And what does it mean to know that we...