FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — University of Arkansas professor Michael Heffernan’s seventh book of poetry, “The Night Breeze Off the Ocean,” will be released at the end of March, just in time for him to sign copies at the Associated Writing Programs annual conference in Vancouver, British Columbia.

“The Night Breeze Off the Ocean” is a collection of Heffernan’s poetry going back to at least 1991. While it includes some poems published in his previous books, most of the material is new.

The title conjures up an image of a wave-swept beach under a starry night sky, but a beach is not the stuff of this poetry. Heffernan said he read an account of a friend’s trip to Africa, and felt a sense of being in another place, breathing the air there.

“The title is kind of a large metaphor that holds everything together,” Heffernan said. “Not necessarily in a neat way, either; this is not about marine life, and there are no beaches in this book.”

According to Heffernan, the thematic aspect of the book articulates itself by way of how the poems seem to fit together and echo each other.

“'The Night Breeze Off the Ocean’ is the place where I wanted all the poems to go,” he said. “I wanted the person reading them to be experiencing the flow of the air in that room, in that space.”

Heffernan will be signing his book during the book fair at the Associated Writing Programs annual conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, on March 31 and April 1.

Heffernan’s poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Crazyhorse, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Poetry, Southern Review, Shenandoah, The Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, Hotel Amerika and other journals. He has also published short stories. His fourth book of poetry, “Love’s Answer,” won the Iowa Poetry Prize in 1993. He has published two books in Ireland with Salmon Poetry, most recently “Another Part of the Island” (1999). He has won three fellowship grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.