Other People

Poem to Fire: Fast transparency that explodes the fuel and air in the cylinder and shuts the intake valves and thrusts down on the piston so the crankshaft spins and spins you can through all material that blocks your way so fast that driving now past rushes and billboards this pull to her could be your own impersonal presence cloaked in the day to day of the malls and condos all those wired sensors keeping on guard for you except you flicker even inside the wet wall where papillary muscle makes that sweet pulsation in whatever room she's moving through this moment under the cotton and the cool smoothness tinted blue In this debut collection, Peter Campion explores both the gaps and the connections between the self and others. Like the "night blooming jasmine leaving its warm trace," these poems arise out of the dark. A man awakens in a hotel room to find the neighboring voices merging with the anguished souls of his nightmare. A woman living alone beside the ocean hears the words of the dead echo in the crashing waves. But if these poems convey a feeling of an enduring emptiness, they also offer us the most vital intimacies. In one poem, two lovers traverse the industrial sweep of strip malls and office towers to arrive at their rendezvous. In another, the seemingly simple memory of a mother playing with her sons at a park bridges a chasm of pain and loss. With great poise, keen insight, and formal skill, Campion moves between shared experience and interior life in the shifting textures of "Other People." Whether writing in rhymed couplets or free verse, he matches a deep understanding of the poetic tradition with his own imaginative feel for structure.

Peter Campion is the Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University. A recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in poetry, Campion is also the author of a book on the art of Mitchell Johnson.