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- LOOKING IN ALL DIRECTIONS POEMS 1954-2000 PETER KANE DUFAULT OCTOBER 2000
ISBN 0-9530947-5-8
A5 176 PAGES
PRICE £10 / 17 EUROS
( See forthcoming Books / Authors / Reviews )
Peter Kane Dufault’s poetry has long been admired on both sides of the Atlantic, yet has remained virtually unavailable to readers. Looking in All Directions, his Selected Poems from 1954 onwards, remedies this, adding over thirty new poems to previous ‘accumulations’. Poem after poem captures a miniature world or wrestles with big questions in ways that are accessible yet resonant and memorable. Dufault’s vision is carried by a music rooted in sources as diverse as Hopkins, Whitman, Wordsworth and Dickinson, but his voice is distinctively his own. We are in the company of a master: there are ‘no frills, just infinity’.
PETER KANE DUFAULT was born in 1923, grew up in Westchester County, N.Y., and studied at Harvard; he now lives and writes in a cabin he built in Hillsdale, New York State. He graduated in 1947 and the first of his books of verse was published in 1954. He has been variously employed as tree-surgeon, journalist, teacher, house-painter, pollster and, in 1968, he was a candidate for US Congress, running on the Liberal Party’s anti-Vietnam war platform; he is known locally as a fiddler, banjo-player and dance-caller. Poems have appeared in many magazines, including the New Yorker and London Magazine, and anthologies, including the 1996 Norton Anthology. He is well known for his live performances and has twice been Visiting Poet at the Cheltenham Festival.
‘I’ve been enjoying Dufault’s poems since the late fifties… Every poem has a surprise - every line pretty well. So fresh and new and itself… wonderful stuff. Snatches those uncatchable moments - like snatching a butterfly out of the air - then letting it go undamaged. So nimble and delicate…’
TED HUGHES
‘His work throughout is distinguished not only by largeness of theme but also by a precision and wit that are uniquely his own.’
AMY CLAMPITT
‘Peter Kane Dufault has been at it for many years, writing poems full of vigor, knowledge and felicity.’
RICHARD WILBUR
‘He is a nature poet for grownups. We need him.’
P.J. KAVANAGH
