Tell Me Again how the White Heron Rises and Flies Across the Nacreous River at Twilight Toward the Distant Islands Book

Skipped day only day of high school (not that I was a Puritan or prude), but never had a reason like this book of poems to just immerse myself in incantation and vision and pain and love and loam and "General metaphysical fall-out"!

After the day, reading and reading Hayden's book, I went to his reading at St. Michaels College ... and ever since I have ponder every inch of Hayden's work, written him letters throughout the 90's when I getting my MFA at Columbia and into the 21st century before his passing. I always marveled, when I look back at my ungrammatical raving, British-Invasion crazed letters of praise and wonder I sent to Hayden, that I always received a beautifully typed letter, then a few dot-matrix letters, but always a healthy chunk of mind and a page of two in response. This labor of reflection to reach out to a babbling-boy, poet wannabe Vermont kid, pre easy Facebook five second soundbites, as I said always amazed me and still holds a place in my writer heart of deep gratitude.

Since 1992, I have been cobbling at literary reflections and the special collections of his papers at UVM hoping some day to be a biographer of his work/life (whatever a biography of any person especially a writer could be -- but there is some Existential glue of life in the process for a earnest, writing immersed, human vision of a biography). Some day I hope to be that proud man or "reader with steely eyes" as he says in his first journal (as a fledgling writer) started March 29th, 1942 ... where he wrote, "I naturally hope that someone shall read it some day. And what a luckless fellow he will be..." But I could not disagree with Hayden more. My time will all his work granted all my failures and forays into the passion of the work of the practical matters of life, right.

My copy of the book has my record of meeting Hayden at many readings (and its not like he was running the roadshows like the Rolling Stones) with signaturs from 1989, 1992, 1996, and 2001 at his Tribute Birthday Gala Event in NYC a Cooper Union -- a night of great people and poets on the stage.

This book of poems might not slip into your Rilkean "Panther" classical-romanticism or be that Sylvia Path dance naked (with Ted Hughes' diction) across the autobiographical page -- but there is all that and more in this slime, long titled work that committed me to poetry, to trying to be a poet for life. Just dare to the long poem "Mother" and you will be able to ride the journalistic, philosophical, sprung rhythms, the Berryman, the Clampitt, the Rich, the Dobyns, the Carver, the energy of a man channeling the world for all his is worth!