Philip F. Deaver
Philip F. Deaver is a winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. His book, Silent Retreats, was published by University of Georgia Press. He's held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Bread Loaf. His work has appeared in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and been recognized in Best American Short Stories and the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has appeared in The Reaper, Florida Review, and Poetry Miscellany. He teaches at Rollins College. Deaver's How Men Pray is the 2005 selection for Anhinga Press's Van K. Brock Florida Poetry Series.
HOW MEN PRAY
BY PHILIP F. DEAVER
$12.00 (email us for availability)
Van K. Brock Florida Poetry Series (2005)
Philip Deaver's How Men Pray simultaneously breaks my heart and deeply comforts me. A man in one of these poems says, "I feel like I've had some sort of visitation"-- and that's just how I feel after reading the book in one sitting. The news here is life saving. -- David Huddle
The poems in How Men Pray are snapshots of the legendary America of promise and disappointment. They are the poems of an equilibrist, a storyteller whose sense of poetry is a mixture of colloquial address, irony, and tenderness toward our losses and our loneliness. -- Carol Frost
This very fine book was written for every mature man who has found himself at the far end of complacent middle-age. Sometimes as uneasy and brooding as fading Polaroids, other times vibrantly straight forward, the poems capture how our lives are clearly delineated only against the ghostly negatives of the past. Deaver does indeed know that "place in the new yard where the day lasts longest..." -- Mark Cox
How Men Pray is a book of dream and remembering, of the slow, shining way the past swallows us and we survive, almost. Here, there's a father's watch with blood on it, a sister's small pink dress, a mother's four weeks to live, a grandfather's magnifying glass which enlarges a lost world. Philip Deaver slips through such things, painful and treasured, and calls back to us. --Marianne Boruch
Your Mars Looming
Your Mars was looming before dawn this morning
at your west horizon of your overbig sky; from here on
it will fade. The planet was amber. Your silence prevailed.
All things seemed to observe the moment. Even the dog
paused to look, in dewy grass, elbow deep, at the edge
of the lake's flat black water. Your day was just beginning.
Yesterday at our same time Mars was higher
in a slightly brighter sky. The days are getting shorter.
When I first began watching, last month, longest days,
heat of summer, the moon passed over ahead of Mars;
but during the month Mars left it far behind, the moon
in its nightly phases, in a big cool orbit of its own,
and Venus and Saturn splayed and went their different ways
and while the big dipper kept its shape, it pivoted and twirled
like a kite hooked to Polaris which remained at your North
as if pinned there. What a living thing your night sky is.
In its hours between the light, we might think it passes
in formation. No. Your synchrony is far bigger than that.