The Cat Outside His Door (Paperback or Softback)

The Cat Outside His Door: Poems After Roethke contains 61 new and selected poems from five decades of poet Fred Wolven’s work. Herein the author explores minute and overpowering elements of nature while examining the development of one’s psyche with vivid depictions of the wonders of our environment.

Just before Theodore Roethke’s death in 1963 Wolven viewed In a Dark Time, a film of Roethke’s performance of his poems in the Puget Sound area. During the film, a cat sat outside his door, thus that cat and Roethke are subjects of many poems in this collection.

In this lyrical-narrative journey through six series of poems one learns how writers impact each other and in the process how their life and writing become transformed. This volume is as close as poetry comes to providing a biographical non-autobiographical study by a current poet of an award winning 20th century master poet. In the process Wolven has created a volume of fascinating poems with a quiet connection between a cat, two poets, and their—our earth.

A native of Roethke's home state, Michigan, the author discovered Roethke's poems in literary periodicals in 1957. Caught by his use of nature and his struggle to understand himself in his poems, Wolven began a life-time study of his work. Living for a time in Saginaw, Roethke’s hometown, near where he grew up, his family florist shop and greenhouses, and the fields he roamed as a youngster, Wolven took in Roethke’s Midwestern roots and his fascination with nature. Wolven also realized Roethke’s deep impact on contemporary poets and in his own writing as Wolven's poetry reflects a deep appreciation of nature and efforts to grasp more fully fundamentals of his own self in searching for the meaning of self. In an extended teaching career, the author used Roethke's work and ideas. Thus, Wolven’s writing evidences Roethke’s influence in his use of nature and a probing for a clearer ID of himself. And nearly five decades later such remains a strong influence in Wolven’s writing.