front cover of The Golden Coin
The Golden Coin
Alan Feldman
University of Wisconsin Press, 2018
What is good fortune? The Golden Coin asks—and answers—this question in poems about youth, conflict, travel, family love, and the joys and fears of getting old. Aboard his sailboat, Feldman draws lessons from the sea about time and history. His gaze tempered not by nostalgia or longing but by satisfaction and happiness, he finds wry joy in the Havana airport's sniffer dog napping near the impounded luggage. In acknowledging the inevitability of change, he reports from the battle zones of an essentially lucky life, with only as much sadness and terror as ordinary life inevitably requires.
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front cover of Immortality
Immortality
Alan Feldman
University of Wisconsin Press, 2015
“Drop the personal,” Alan Feldman’s best friend advises. But what else does he have? Feldman takes his title from Zhivago’s interpretations of the afterlife: “Your soul, your immortality, your life in others.”
            In a collection where the dead do speak, Feldman’s poems in his first segment, “Self-Portraits,” are more likely to be about others than about himself. The segment “Partners” reflects on marriage and divorce, the latter an “uncontested victor over marriage, / the way the flood is champion over the flood plain.” In the section “Offshore” Feldman writes about travel to Uruguay, his impractical love of sailing, and his wonder at Walter Cronkite’s obtuseness about Vietnam. In his final segment, “What Now?,” he asks about meaning itself. Babysitting his tiny granddaughter, he thinks of sailing—hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror—and wonders if even this suggests something world-encompassing he’s “still hoping to find a name for. / If it isn’t joy.”

Winner of the Mass Book Award for Poetry, Massachusetts Center for the Book
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front cover of A Sail to Great Island
A Sail to Great Island
Alan Feldman
University of Wisconsin Press, 2004
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.
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