The Sea of Tranquility

"...his poems about old age are like fierce beacons lighting the horizon." -- People's Daily World"Don Gordon is one of the most overlooked poets of the twentieth century..." -- Bloomsbury Review80 Black Hole Childhood Chosen People Citizen Band The City Communique The Distance To The Planets In The Cell In The Vanguard Light Lions Los Desaparecidos Minnows The Missiles The Mole Neighborhood Watch No One On The Border On The Mesa The Scientist The Sea Of Tranquility Someone Has Heard The Tears The Theory There Were No People To The Survivors Waiting The Widows Words And Music Worlds -- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®Survival is not enough for Don Gordon, a neglected poet of our era who writes poems of age's hard wisdom: "Me child is welling up in me, / A terrible fountain of bones." Older blood brother of Wendell Berry, Gordon's poems arise out of a concem for a land and people that nourished his eighty-seven years in a world that now seems fallen away into "nightmare cliffs," materialism, and confusion: "Talk now on this frequency before they jam it. Find out: why everything crawls into dark culverts, There are no lights on the plain." Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1902, now a resident of Los Angeles and author of five previous books of poetry, Gordon, according to Thomas McGrath, "is one of the very best of revolutionary poets." Unmythical and outspoken, these candid poems are disarmingly directed at the nerve centers of our national psyche. A twentieth-century poet-prophet, Gordon believes in the civic and moral duty of a poet "to invent a sea of tranquility / in the heartland." Things matter to him as they did to Matthew Arnold and Edmund Wilson. His work has the gentleness of an eighteenth-century house and the toughness of an M-16. Despite the semi-apocalyptic edge to his vision, "The Sea of Tranquility" discloses a sad, upbeat blossoming, a twilight mood not unlike King Lear watching Cordelia die. -- From Independent Publisher