SEACOAST POETRY

After a stirring term as Portsmouth poet laureate, John Perrault has yet another book of verse. Fellow laureate Marie Harris says of his latest collection: "His poems are heartfelt, unsentimental, tender and muscular . . . political and deeply personal."

HERE COMES THE OLD MAN NOW
Poems by John Perrault

A new collection by John Perrault, poet/balladeer, author of The Ballad of Louis Wagner and other New England Stories in Verse (with photos by Peter Randall), and Portsmouth Poet Laureate (2003–2005).

...whether to stormy Maine coasts, to the Paris of heritage, to the Argentina of the disappeared . . . All his dispatches resound against the base: home, hearth and the family around us and before and after us. . . . – Jean Pedrick

John Perrault has an eye for the way daily life can become suddenly luminous, and an ear--an unerring ear--for vivid and precise language, for the nuances that shift such language into song. He is equally adept at free and formal verse, converting his rich insights into delicate lyrics of desire, regret and awe. Whether he's talking about family or his New England coastal landscape, matters of physical health or travels to distant lands, we can trust that this poet is willing to "tread in the dark between waves, waiting for whatever it is" that will "open to us underneath our lives and speak." – Betsy Sholl

Here Comes the Old Man Now
Oyster River Press
Durham, NH
$15.00 (2005, 96 pp)
Click to order

SEE & HEAR: Ballad of the Squalus:
READ: The Brief Against Bush

From the new book:
NORTH COUNTRY

The last breath of moon
falls cool tonight, bone
white, with a scent of death.
Under my loins, the earth,
moving as if a woman,
moving as if she alone
makes the difference, eases
me into the sky, teases
me up into the widening dark
like a bat—my heart
beating against the air.
From here, blindness doesn’t scare
half so much as space . . .

the idea that a human face
can disappear like that!

Like that! and not come back.

Copyright 2005 John Perrault

VISIT: Portsmouth Poet Laureate web site