Celestial Joyride

PRAISE FOR MICHAEL WATERS It is difficult to imagine poetry could be more finely crafted and compelling than the work of Michael Waters, who has been quietly writing some of the best poetry in the United States for the past three decades. --Stephan Delbos, Prague Post In lines that are often metrically formal--the decasyllabic line appears in many of [his poems]--there is often a quite wild range of emotion, from the overtly sexual to the politically conscious, the plaintively domestic to the brashly cosmopolitan. This is highly energized verse. --Michael Broek, Poetry International Waters seeks to capture the different kinds of negative space which interpenetrate American public life, history, and even the most intimate of moments 'between two bodies'--what he calls 'the loneliness of two people / together.' --Jonathan Taylor, Times Literary Supplement A significant American voice... testifies eloquently to the persistence of the lyric in a time and history that would seek to obliterate it. --John Mann, World Literature Today Waters excels at stark-eyed, honest elegies... all rendered in the strong free verse that is [his] signature. He is a poet of detail, but also one of directness, pursuing strong feeling wherever it dives or climbs. --Publishers Weekly Waters seeks and appropriates a rich, malleable language that allows him to express the subtleties of human emotion and the realities of the human condition... Michael Waters is perhaps the best poet of his generation. --Floyd Collins, Gettysburg Review Michael Waters' autobiographical poetry looks back to memorable moments, which include his 6-year-old son: Is that a log or a dog? he worries.//The poem doesn't know yet. Guess, it insists./ Meaning to animate the universe,/Dog, I wager (I always wager dog)/And on three wobbly legs the wet log lifts. He also writes luminously, as in Eve's Daughter, cleaning windows: Each chamois gesture returning to glass/A certain beauty always there, but less/Obvious before this moment, the light//After seven days' rain casting judgment//Upon all things with odd clarity: dust/Flared to meaning, your body enraptured/By the hour's whispered solicitations./Your flown soul unveiled will never be missed://The glass so clean it no longer exists. Waters stands among the best American poets writing today. -- My San Antonio