The poems in this collection capture the fantastic feeling of falling in love, all while keeping eyes on its lifecycles of crashing aftermaths, lingering regrets, guilt, and renewal. Peter Campion brings us to a series of scenes—on the damp patio, in the darkroom, and along the interstate—where we find familiar characters, lovers, and strangers. In the title poem, he takes us to the falls, where people and passions mix amid the sticky hanging mists:
                        That charge of summer nights, that edge, like everyone’s checking
                        everyone out. Lingering a moment in the crowd
                        gathered to watch the rush and crash and let the mist
                        drift upward to our faces, I’m here: the future feels
                        open again. Even alone tonight—still: open.
 
Campion’s poems introduce us to a range of people, all of whom are rendered with distinctiveness and intimacy. Their voices proliferate through the collection, with lyric folding into speech, autobiography becoming dramatic monologue, and casual storytelling taking on a ritualistic intensity. The poems in One Summer Evening at the Falls show how each character and each moment can be worthy of love and that this love both undoes us and makes us who we are. In narrative and lyric, in formal verse and free, Campion brings contemporary playfulness together with his classical talent to create this far-reaching and tender collection.
 

Peter Campion is the author of three previous collections of poetry and most recently of Radical as Reality: Form and Freedom in American Poetry. His poems have appeared in publications including Poetry, Slate, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, and New Republic, among others. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, he teaches in the graduate creative writing program at the University of Minnesota.
 

Acknowledgments

One

One Summer Evening at the Falls
The Lingering
Bud, the Photographer
Commuters
She Dreamed a Giant Screen
Saint Anthony Falls
Le Chien
After Ovid: The House of Rumor

Two

Chorus
Ice Cream
After Sappho: The Drill
After Horace
In Memory of Terry Adkins
1.    His Shoes
2.    Bees
After Baudelaire: The Cover
Sitcom Set
After Jin Eun Yung: Long Finger Poem

Three

The Street We Lived On
Greensleeves
Uncle
1.    His Picture
2.    The End of Your Sentence
2B
1989
Pacific
One Summer Evening at the Falls (II)
Night Hill
Call