Far West: Poems - Paperback

by Floyd Skloot (Author)

Floyd Skloot's Far West intertwines the past and present, as time alternates between racing and standing still. Crafting poems that confront memory lapses and painful recollections, Skloot traces his moments of purest perception and expression: his wife practicing music, his daughter finding delight in the presence of wildlife, Vladimir Nabokov able to lose himself when playing goalie in a soccer match. A poem about a forgotten word or name can lead to one about a song that refuses to stop playing over and over in our minds, or to an evocation of a long-dead futuristic novelist who comes back from the afterlife to find a world even stranger than any he imagined. In poems that range from traditional forms and short lyrics to longer narratives and free verse, Skloot explores how emotional experiences--memory and forgetting, love and loss, reverie and urgent attention--all come together in our search for coherence and authentic self-expression.

Front Jacket

"Floyd Skloot is a maestro of fading plenitude. Moving through sweeping expanses of geography and imagination--through Central park, Elsinore, Dusseldorf, the Oregon Coast, the afterlife--Far West explores the mystery of what happens in the darkness of the skull and the vulnerability of the brain to time and violence. Skloot's snapshots of past worlds slow down attention to do the work of real visitation, navigating the precarious relationship between naming and claiming so fluently that it is easy to 'believe his steady/song.'"--Mary Szybist, author of Incarnadine, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry

"Experience, memory, and language--that holy trinity of our being--enact their dance of meaning in these lucid, thickly-textured narratives and deft sonnets. There's an ontological tenderness about these poems-- it doesn't have to do with anything obvious--they're the opposite of sentimental, but their ambition is to acknowledge and transfigure even the fiercest or saddest of personalities--whether they are the poet's distant father and harsh mother, or historical figures (Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling house-hunting by bicycle). Under Skloot's alert scrutiny, things, people, and creatures are radiant and mundane at the same time, and the holiness of our ordinary world is profoundly evoked."--Gregory Orr, author of A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry

Author Biography

Floyd Skloot is the author of eight previous poetry collections, including The End of Dreams, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize; The Snow's Music; and Approaching Winter. He has won three Pushcart Prizes and the PEN USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction. He lives in Oregon.