Poet Robert VanderMolen's New Collection: WATER

Kicking off 2009, The Maia Chronicles will take a literary turn, with an an article on poet Robert VanderMolen! Felicia insisted on conducting the interview herself! But she said I could serve tea and cookies. Today's post introduces Bob, and his latest tome, WATER. More about life as a writer to be featured in The Maia Chronicles over the next few days.


Michigan poet Robert VanderMolen [above] has published many collections since his original Blood Ink, including Breath, Along the River, Circumstances, and The Invisible lost Book of Ocean Fish. His latest is Water, published this January by Michigan State University Press.

Critical acclaim has been profuse: "I had an extraordinary experience with the new Robert VanderMolen collection, Water, reading it one poem a day in the morning with the attention that fine poetry deserves. 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.

"Good duty to celebrate Robert VanderMolen's gifts--these poems full of careful camera work, dark and cinematic narratives from one of our finest wordsmiths--each (to borrow Frost's word) an "adventure."--Thomas Lynch, author or The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade.


And: "Robert VanderMolen's poetry inhabits, geographically and imaginatively, a particular region: the Grand River Valley and the lake country of Western Michigan. The poet mixes naturalistic detail with disembodied conversation, broken narrative, excavations of local history, and memory. And erotic current runs through it all. It is a heady mix: dreamlike and haunting, and very singular, almost as if one were overhearing a conversation between Edgar Lee Masters and John Ashbery, half-lit, in a cabin outside Saugatuck on a warm spring night. There is nothing quite like it in American poetry and, to my mind, no poet now at work more interesting."--August Kleinzahler [see above, pictured with Felicia and Bob and the late Paco, in 2000], author of Sleeping It Off in Rapid City.

WATER is available at Amazon.com. In the next few posts, we will learn more about VanderMolen as he discusses the writer's life and takes a Proust Questionnaire. Stay tuned....