University of Arkansas Press Publishes Two New Books in Its Poetry Series

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. -The University of Arkansas Press is pleased to announce the publication of two new titles in the Press’s distinguished Poetry Series, edited by Enid Shomer.

Christopher Bursk’s “The First Inhabitants of Arcadia” (Paperback $16.00) is a fascinating collection that investigates the magic of the alphabet and language. Herman Melville, Dusty Rhodes, and Hoyt Wilhelm skinny-dip and pick up gondoliers and cut figure eights into the ice in this collection. Here too are poems about a boy’s first investigations into the nature of language as he studies the backs of baseball cards, and a young man’s infatuation with the “F-word.” The titles sing their lettered songs: “An Ode to j,” “M-m-m Good!” and “O in Trouble.” And over the whole book broods the great lexicographer, Samuel Johnson, that deeply troubled caretaker of the mother tongue. More than an ABC book, this collection asks questions at the very heart of how we understand the world and shows us the glory and silliness at the heart of human life.

    Christopher Bursk, recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim and Pew, is professor of English at Bucks County Community College in Pennsylvania. He is the author of a number of collections, including “The Improbable Swervings of Atoms,” winner of the 2004 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. He has been recognized for his work with prisoners, the homeless, food banks and women’s shelters.

    The poems in “Walking Through the Horizon” (paperback $16.00) by Margaret Holley deal with what is familiar to us and the challenge of leaving it for new horizons. The poems are full of feeling and wisdom in equal parts, and are enriched and informed by the poet’s landscape, whether it is Switzerland or Arizona. The landscape, in fact, becomes a kind of mirror we gaze into to see the future that at every turn is approaching and moving through us to illuminate the past. A book remarkable for the complete authenticity of its feeling and candor, “Walking Through the Horizon” shows us the simultaneity of the past and the future and is grounds for hopefulness and joy: “These are gifts worth passing on: / the beckoning vista, the sudden frontier, / the rivers of days and years to come.”

     Margaret Holley works in Scottsdale, Ariz., for the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science. She was formerly director of the creative writing program at Bryn Mawr. Her previous poetry collections include “The Smoke Tree” (Winner of the Bluestem Award). One of America’s most renowned poets, Mary Oliver, has said that “Holley deserves a wider audience.”