Forever: Poems

Praised for a voice with the crystalline, transformative, pure pitch of a lyric poet (Ilya Kaminsky), James Longenbach explores a life lived with the knowledge of its end in his sixth collection. These luminous, lyrical poems pose a question: Why did this poet once live as if he would live forever? And what does it mean to know that we will not?

Forever explores the meaning of love, from its discovery in the first poem, Two People, to its maintenance in the last, Forever. In between, the volume explores the precariously imminent demise of all that we lovethe finite lives of other people, the mortal beauty of Veniceall thrown into urgent relief by the poets own cancer diagnosis.

Evoking the vivid dailiness of domestic lifeand the specificity and poignance of memories, these lyrics are intimately personal, achingly autobiographical (Langdon Hammer, American Scholar). Forthright, moving and wry, the poems in Forever look back gratefullyexcitedlyon a lifetime of self-making and self-shattering events.