ABOUT THIS BOOK

The first full-length collection in many years by an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, and a host of other journals.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Alan Feldman is professor of English at Framingham State College and for many years taught the advanced creative writing course at the Radcliffe Seminars, Harvard University. The Massachusetts Artists Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts have awarded him fellowships in poetry. His first book of poems, The Happy Genius, won the 1978 Elliston Book Award.

REVIEWS

"In A Sail to Great Island a sailor explores what he can learn in isolation with nature, and a landman, rooted in his bonds to family and place, works to get past the grid of his own needs in order to explore the meaning and value of his connections. The poems begin with clearly defined contexts, but they move quickly to reach beyond the local, gathering weight and momentum as they explore with wit and sympathy the widest implications of their subjects."—Carl Dennis, Felix Pollak Prize judge and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Practical Gods

“Feldman has been building extraordinary and deeply moving poems for some forty years now, and it’s high time a magnum of champagne was cracked across the bow of a new book with his name on it. Here is a master-maker who can offer us poems that dazzle us with their beauty as they ride us through everyday real, or break our heart because they are so imaginative, so true. Alan Feldman is one of the best poets in America.“—Bill Zavatsky, winner of the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for Earthlight: Poems of André Breton

“Alan Feldman’s poems are sentimental in the best sense of the word: fully intelligent, closely attentive studies of how feeling colors and enriches experience. Inventive, vital, witty, and precise, this poet has a rare and deep allegiance to the life of the heart. Reading Feldman’s steady, funny, well-wrought poems reminds me how blind we are in the world; reading these poems I feel my fingertips being guided over the Braille.” —Tony Hoagland, author of What Narcissism Means to Me, and winner of the James Laughlin Award for Donkey Gospel

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
Acknowledgments 000
I.
On the Mooring 000
A Memoir 000
Listening to Keats 000
Pavane 000
Beside the Broad Dordogne 000
A Visit from My Sister (c. 1982) 000
On Memorial Drive 000
Woman 000
Dissolving the Boundaries 000
Contemporary American Poetry 000
Girl with Sunflower in Hand 000
II.
Family Happiness 000
Girls in the Museum 000
Self-Portrait 000
For Sam 000
At the Château Noir 000
Using Anne Frank 000
In My Dream I Appear before the Senate 000
On Brattle Street 000
The Back of the Building 000
Old Post Card from the Jura 000 
Sailing Solo 000
By the Time I Met Brian's Father 000
I Come Back from a Sail 000
To Solitude 000
Bill Evans Plays Never Let Me Go 000
III.
This Fog 000
Reason 000
My Century 000
Early Spring 000
Two Deer 000
A Weeping Cherry Tree 000
Spring 000
Letter from My Working Self to My Resting Self 000
Grayness 000
The Couple at the Window 000
After Watching Twyla Tharp 000

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