A Different Heaven

Celebrating four decades of living in Greece, A DIFFERENT HEAVEN: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS joins the more prominent poems from the author's five previous collections (three full length books and two chapbooks) with more recent work and a sampling of translations from modern Greek that have influenced his writing and continue to resonate off it. 

Taken together, the poems in this collection chart one American's experience of living in a part of the world where the ancient and modern, the urban and rural, and the mythical and mundane intermingle in wondrous and sometimes disconcerting ways. 

As the poems go deeper into the land, language and culture the author has come to embrace, they engage in an ongoing dialogue with such ancients as Homer, Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle. Other poems speak in the voice of marginalized biblical figures, such as Hagar, Joseph and Lazarus. Earlier free verse looks out at the world from within Egyptian sarcophagi and beneath the gilded surface of Byzantine icons. More recent blank verse and sonnets interact with shepherds and poets; painters and refugees; archaeologists, cemetery workers and assorted others who people the landscape that he now calls home.