Against distance

the long version

In Peter Makuck's Against Distance nature is both a reprieve and a danger. Here, various landscapes - oceans, inlets, rivers, foothills, deserts - pressure and test human relationships. The book's title poem finds a young boy on an inner tube in a rip tide - "waving an arm that couldn't be seen" and ends "thinking of saving/ and of being saved/ by a boy/ who could have been my son/ and kept me from drowning." In language full of power and surprise, Makuck illuminates nature's weather and the weather of the human spirit.