NEWS FROM WHERE I LIVE Format: Paperback

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. Even when he works in the voice of a suicide, his precision can be devastating, as in these lines: “When you lie beside me under stars, each needlepoint / of light pricks my bare arms.”

With equal ease, 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.”

Martin Lammon edited Written in Water, Written in Stone: Twenty Years of Poets on Poetry. His poems have appeared in many journals, including Ploughshares and the Gettysburg Review, and were chosen by W. S. Merwin as winner of a Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. He holds the Callaway/ Flannery O’Connor Chair in Creative Writing at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville.