Winter Tenor
Kevin Goodan
Available May 2009
In Goodan's second collection, nature is equally cruel to all, and yearning is subsumed by an acceptance as terrible as it is beautiful. These poems are ecstatic, musical prayers, finding God in the details as well as the void. Winter Tenor is a tightly wrought lyric exploration of the severities of farm life, where doom and grace are one.
"Granted, delightedly, its Keatsian pressures, compressions and urgency, Kevin Goodan's Winter Tenor is no 'cold pastoral.' No indeed; these poems choir a warm sound from the barest branches and stir the embers of dark flames ablaze. Here is the soul of heat driven straight through the roots and veins of this old world."
—Donald Revell
"We readers are lucky when we encounter a voice that speaks as if it were speaking to each of us alone, an impossible and therefore necessary illusion, a miracle of multiple visions, essential in a commonplace way only what's divine can determine—this describes Winter Tenor's quintessential and most valuable presence. I love reading this book."
—Dara Wier
about the author
Kevin Goodan’s first book of poems, In the Ghost-House Acquainted, was published by Alice James Books in 2004 and chosen for the 2005 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. His poems have appeared in such journals as Ploughshares, The Colorado Review and American Poet, and he has taught Creative Writing at the University of Connecticut and Wesleyan University. He is an Assistant Professor at Lewis-Clark State College, and lives on a bluff overlooking the Clearwater River.
Author photo by Kimberly Burwick
