News from where I live

the long version

Winner of the eighth annual Arkansas Poetry Award, Martin Lammon writes poems that deal fearlessly and directly with their subjects. Tenderness, complexity, compassion, reverence, and condemnation are all within his range. Writing of love, he can speak broadly and universally of the heart, yet in the same poem, he can intricately describe a woman's hand, a fire on a beach, or the hollows around a lover's eye. With equal case, Lammon travels across miles, cultures, and time, writing of kilns and potters in Japan, long-dead Eskimos in Alaska, or Blue Hole Cave in Pennsylvania. Full of grace and candor, these poems pursue the stories that shimmer behind the day's headlines, seeking the spirit at stake in the "lives beside [our] own whose secrets are worth loving."