“Aliveness is Gary Gildner’s striking quality,” Crystal McLean writes in the magazine New Letters, and thise selection of Gary Gildner’s previously published poems, plus eighteen new poems, demonstrates the aptness of that perception. Accessible and eminently readable, the poems in Blue Like the Heavens also possess great emotional depth. Readers who complain about the obscurity of contemporary American poetry will delight in this book.

Calling from the Scaffold is a collection of poems about connecting and not connecting—of approaching the brink of connecting. It’s about paying tribute and salvaging and gratitude. The voices vary in their longings: we hear from men and women, the young and no longer young. Nature often is there to help them out. The poet, also a writer of fiction and nonfiction, is interested in story, in his characters’ ability to move down the road, searching for their best selves, best home, putting together the pieces that move them toward that famous happy ending.

In these fifteen personal essays, Gary Gildner comes of age at a Catholic school learning Latin, how the girls crossed their legs in algebra, and football in the school’s bomb shelter by exchanging punches with his best friend. He goes to Communist Poland to teach American literature and, in medias res, teaches the Warsaw Sparks baseball team how to win. Living in Czechoslovakia when that country is splitting in half, he learns the meaning of “Where the Dog is Buried” and fathers a daughter. Gildner writes about his Polish-German family’s immigrant story and his friendships with poet Richard Hugo and Raymond Andrews, his college roommate and the author of Baby Sweet’s and other African American novels. He writes about 9/11, stealing, meeting a cougar up close, meeting Michele, felling his barn in Idaho’s Clearwater Mountains with a crowbar, and boxing with Chuck Davey, a fellow Michigan State Spartan and one-time challenger for the World Welterweight title.
 
Essays from this collection have appeared in such venues as the New York Times Magazine, The Southern Review, and New Letters.