Most mornings for the past decade, poet Scott Wiggerman has walked the trails at Austin's Mueller Lake Park, an urban space created on land that once held the city's airport. Awake to the landscape as he walked, Wiggerman stopped from time to time and jotted a word or phrase for a poem that would come later. Leaf and Beak is the product of these walks, of the poet's ever watchful eye, of the discipline he learned mastering the sonnet. Readers are in good hands here. The sonnets-seventy-five of them-flow so smoothly you can forget you're reading a sonnet and just let the images take you in, the rhythms move you forward. The poems of Leaf and Beak are quiet poems, reflective poems, poems that ask you to walk in stillness for moments at a time, to absorb "the hidden in full view," to appreciate "a lone green leaf / that hangs on like a weekend birthday, deaf / to bitter winds." Wiggerman moves from the observed image, letting some details turn him inward while others lead to meditations on his fellow beings, on the world he walks. "What will / tomorrow bring that now cannot be seen?" he asks. "What change, what wonders to discover?"

Leaf and Beak: Sonnets

Literature & Fiction

Wiggerman, Scott

Poetry

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Presence is Scott Wiggerman's second volume of poetry, the long-awaited follow-up to Vegetables and Other Relationships. Wiggerman is the chief editor of Dos Gatos Press in Austin, where he has co-edited the annual Texas Poetry Calendar for the past seven years. He has also edited Big Land, Big Sky, Big Hair, an anthology of Texas-themed poetry, and recently co-edited Wingbeats: Exercises and Practice in Poetry, a collection of poetry-writing exercises from teaching poets across the country. "In Presence we meet, in the poet's own words, 'the drumming of a buoyant heart.' It is a sound that will not defer to injustice. It is an intelligent and artful yawp that won't go quietly. It is a witnessing we need to hear in a world so full of babbling and duplicity. It's the sound of truth itself. Through it all, Wiggerman's marvelous craft gives shape to his versatility and poignant insight. He is a must-read American poet. Share him with everyone you know who cares about words and the truth." -Robert McDowell, author of the bestselling Poetry as Spiritual Practice: Reading, Writing, and Using Poetry in Your Daily Rituals, Aspirations, and Intentions "In Presence, Scott Wiggerman uses an intransigent stain as an emblem of buoyant integrity in the face of intolerance and exclusion. In this new book, nimbly arranged by the elements, the poet, brandishing his trademark sass, humor, and candor, glories in local nature and limns the joys and trials of being a lovingly irreverent Texas gadfly, a proud and forthright gay man." -Cyrus Cassells, Lambda award-winning author of Beautiful Signor

Presence

Pecan Grove Pr

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Books by Wiggerman, Scott

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wiggerman, Scott. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Leaf and Beak: Sonnets

Presence