This new collection from award-winning poet Floyd Skloot, tracks life in all its mixed possibilities, taking hard but necessary glances at our ever-changing world. Concerned with the fluidity and fragility of memory, Skloot's new poems move between the realms of health and illness; past and present; remembering and forgetting; and the stability of change. Skloot is a versatile wordsmith who gives us lyric, narrative, and formal poemspoems in which lessons are learned from what is lost. His home, a fir and pine forest in western Oregon, provides the anchor for his work and lives at the heart of this collection. Dead artists, poets, writers, composers, actors, and even major league shortstops return to visit Skloot in the remote woods where he lives, and teach him about the sweet rewards of living in the moment.
In Skloot's poems, we hear melodies interrupted, beauty resonating between those empty spaces and the insouciant chortle of a parrot who leaves us yearning for more of that indescribable something we're all searching for. Gauguin in Oregon, cello music vibrating in blue and gold, a mother disguised as a scowling gypsy jangling her tambourine: these are the images of Skloot's world, a place where life's tender moments can also be robust and bold.
The Harvard Review called Floyd Skloot ""A poet of singular skill and subtle intelligence,"" and radiating from the center of Approximately Paradise are poems that earn this praise by emoting universal themes like a mother's love, acceptance, wholenessthemes that succeed in reminding us of an elegant and simple paradise that is always within our reach.
In poem after amazing poem in Approximately Paradise, Floyd Skloot deploys form (a sonnet on his mother's Alzheimer's, a long narrative on the ghost of the legendary Dodger fielder Pee Wee Reese), continuously seeking that place where, Rilke tells us, beauty is born out of just-bearable terror. And again and again, he finds that place; finds it a place suffused with tenderness.Gregory Orr
""... it takes great skill to respect the suffering of the sick and their families while also grasping and transforming it into a work of art. Floyd Skloot is the first poet I have run across in possession of such powers. Though far too many poets have tried to paste pathos on the page, hoping the overwhelm with raw power and impress with a rather egotistic display of profound feeling, Skloot impresses with an ear attuned to the counterpoint of sentence rhythm, rhyme, and meter, and with the true artist's commitment to making the most private and personal suffering revealable to others through a selfless attention to the vivid scene and dispassionate narrative.""--James Wilson, Notre Dame Review --Review
About the Author
Floyd Skloot is the author of four novels, four memoirs, and seven books of poetry, including The End of Dreams, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Selected Poems, 1970-2005. His work has won three Pushcart Prizes, the PEN Center USA Literary Award, and a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Book Award, and has been included in numerous anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Floyd Skloot is a creative nonfiction writer, poet, and fiction writer whose work has received three Pushcart Prizes, a Pen USA Literary Award, two Pacific NW Book Awards, an Independent Publishers Book Award, and two Oregon Book Awards. His writing has appeared in such distinguished magazines as The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Poetry, American Scholar, Georgia Review, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, Hudson Review, Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, and Creative Nonfiction. His seventeen books include the memoirs In the Shadow of Memory (University of Nebraska Press, 2003), A World of Light (University of Nebraska Press, 2005), and The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer's Life (University of Nebraska Press, 2008); the poetry collections Approximately Paradise (Tupelo Press, 2005), The End of Dreams (Louisiana State University Press, 2006), Selected Poems: 1970-2005 (Tupelo Press, 2008), and The Snow's Music (Louisiana State University Press, 2008); and the novels Summer Blue (Story Line Press, 1994) and Patient 002 (Rager Media, 2007).
His newest books include his first collection of short stories, Cream of Kohlrabi (Tupelo Press, 2011), and a forthcoming collection of poems, Close Reading (Tupelo Press, 2013).
He co-edited The Best American Science Writing 2011 (HarperCollins/Ecco Press) with his daughter, Rebecca Skloot.
He contributes book reviews to the New York Times Book Review, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Times, Harvard Review, Sewanee Review, Notre Dame Review and other publications, and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
Floyd has taught at the Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Summer Writers Conference at Goucher College, the Paris Writers Workshop, and elsewhere.
He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Beverly Hallberg, a weaver and landscape painter, whose light-filled works cross between impressionistic and abstracted styles. Her paintings grace the covers of Floyd's books, Approximately Paradise, The End of Dreams, Selected Poems: 1970-2005, and The Snow's Music. See her work at www.beverlyhallberg.com.
Floyd's daughter, Rebecca Skloot, is the bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Crown Books, 2010), winner of the Heartland Prize and Wellcome Trust Book Prize, and named Best Book of 2010 by Amazon.com. Visit her website at www.rebeccaskloot.com.
Skloot is represented by Andrew Blauner at Blauner Books Literary Agency. Contact him at: Blauner@aol.com.
