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Surfings: Selected Poems of Will Inman

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David Ray and Michael Rattee have done the world an important service by judiciously winnowing Willl Inman's vast, deep and mighty oevre of poetry into this lightly held, yet weighty and significant collection. The last two lines of Inman's poem "Last Chant for Pablo Neruda" are, "O Yes, I laugh, my Brother, for all the junta fires / can only scorch your songs into our throats!" Here is the voice of the poet that speaks for himself and for all of us; whose laugh echoes Whitman's barbaric yelp and whose powerful lasso cinches metaphor with the roses and thorns of the natural world.
Will Inman wrote, "You have to find out what's known in you and what's known around you." His poems show he did that well
Whether his observations concern the environment (its beauty or our encroachment upon it) or the people who work the land and sea, Will Inman picks up the pulse of life around him and distills it into poetry. Describing the people who shell oysters ("Landscapes Live Within Us") he wrote: "The shellers/always had scarred hands, lined black with oyster/ mud, thumbs and knuckles often cracked from cold./They were always friendly and invariably thought/us townsfolk funny.../Now and then/an oyster gave up a knotty little pearl. And/tiny crabs, caught hiding in the shells, would/turn up in the bowls steaming orange like/sea flowers, reluctant before our ravening eyes. I treasured several of the pearls, trying not to/admit to myself how ugly they were, wondering even/if their original sandgrain might be a diamond."
Surfings: Selected Poems of Will Inman has pearls and diamonds on every page.