Peter Kane Dufault was born in 1923 and has been writing poetry for almost sixty years. Born and raised in New York, he attended Harvard and served as a bomber pilot during World War Two. In 1968 he ran for Congress in Columbia County, NY on the Liberal Party’s anti-war platform. He has been variously employed as a treesurgeon, journalist, teacher, house-painter and pollster; he has twice been poet-in-residence at the Cheltenham Festival. He is well known as fiddler, banjo-player and dance-caller and his readings of his own poems are legendary. A film about him (Stations of the Double Cross: An American Poet’s State of the Union) is due for release in September 2008. His poems have appeared in many magazines and journals including the New Yorker, London Magazine and Poetry. He currently lives and writes in a cabin he built in Hillsdale, New York State.
To Be In The Same World follows on from Worple’s much-acclaimed Looking In All Directions (Poems 1954-2000); many poems follow the tradition of the ‘American Sublime’, with Dufault reaching back to Emerson and Whitman and their belief in nature as moral teacher, the corner-stone of ethics and spiritual growth. The second part of the book is largely taken up with overtly political poems, urgent and satirical stabs at US domestic and foreign policy before and after 9/11. The poems in both parts of the book are, as ever, memorable, superbly crafted and again show Dufault to be one of America’s most important and undervalued writers.
Praise for Peter Kane Dufault:
‘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.’
Ted Hughes
‘He is a nature poet for grown ups. We need him.’
P.J.Kavanagh
‘Dufault is very much a substantial poet…arriving here now, at his best, as fresh and valuable as ever’
George Szirtes (Poetry Review)
‘Dufault’s inquisitive poems amuse as they instruct. His poems constantly kindle curiosity about life, all the while suggesting a way of coping with its inevitable end.’
John Taylor (Poetry)
