Robert VanderMolen

Robert VanderMolen has published many collections since his original Blood Ink, including Breath, Along the River, Circumstances, and The Invisible Lost Book of Ocean Fish.

Water
Poems by Robert VanderMolen

Robert VanderMolen

"Poetry is ultimately an obsession of our soul life and VanderMolen easily makes it into the current top ten of my own restoratives. He is a 'seer' in the oldest sense."
— Jim Harrison, author of The English Major and Legends of the Fall

A new poetry collection by Robert VanderMolen, a born storyteller. In his narrative poems, it is not uncommon for someone to lose a thread or to lose direction entirely: "I lost the progression / Of his tale in the heat, / Watching the dangling / Growth on the tip of his tongue, / Something out of a Hawthorne / Story, a slight worm / As in a mouth of an angler fish." Through his verse, we often seem to enter in the middle of a story — and we always want to know more: "A man and a woman in a rowboat / On a hazy day, drifting out where the island used to be, / Who would have guessed he would have snapped like that."

VanderMolen says that he observes the world. And while this is no doubt true, it is equally true that he creates the world he portrays in his poems. He is like a guide to a world we know well but can't quite see. And we are grateful for the light — more flashlight than spotlight — that he shines on scenes we would never see without him.

Reviews

"Here is a poet who sees with an unsentimental eye-walking around, listening, overhearing and peering through window screens and across hedges and gunwales of boats. If that sounds as though this poet has voyeuristic tendencies, you have it right: He does. The intersections between men and women are rendered suggestively and left, cleverly, for the reader to interpret. There is not tragedy here so much as humor, miscommunication and wonder; not love so much as the erotic possibilities of a moment...." - award-winning poet PATRICIA CLARK

-