David Lee Garrison publishes Light in the River

David Lee Garrison has a new book of poems out called Light in the River. The publisher, Dos Madres Press, describes it this way:

In accessible poems that are much like stories, David Lee Garrison finds ambiguity and mystery beneath the surface of everyday experience.  He rewrites the Biblical creation myth, positing Dog before Man; he imagines John Keats as a baseball player; he watches children play Hide and Seek and rejoice in finding and being found; he ponders the epitaphs in an old graveyard; and, he remembers a singer who came in one measure too early on the Hallelujah Chorus. The poet envisions life as a meandering journey through a summer afternoon by the river–humid and intense, with revelation everywhere, like leaves and shadows on the water.

Professor Garrison taught Spanish and Portuguese at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, from 1979 until his retirement in 2009. He lives in Oakwood with his wife, Suzanne Kelly-Garrison, a novelist, poet, and law lecturer at Wright State University.

Here is an excerpt from Light in the River:

Every River on Earth

I look out the window and see
through the neighbor’s window

to an Amish buggy
where three children are peeping back,

and in their eyes I see the darkness
of plowed earth hiding seed.

Wind pokes the land in winter,
trying to waken it,

and in the melting snow
I see rainbows and in them

every river on earth. I see all the way
to the ocean, where sand and stones

embrace each falling wave
and reach back to gather it in.

• Visit the publisher's website for more information.