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Days Like This Are Necessary
New and Selected Poems
by
Walter Bargen, first Poet Laureate of Missouri
Price
$15.95 paper, 222 pages
ISBN 978-1-886157-70-5
Featured on Verse Daily
His work is technically sophisticated, rhythmically subtle, and
emotionally complex, but—and here’s the trick—it’s also the kind
of poetry that one might offer to someone who says he doesn’t
like poetry all that much...one of Walter Bargen’s great gifts
is his ability to speak directly to any intelligent reader,
without compromising in any way, and to make himself understood,
in all his complexity.
—
Kevin Prufer
Bargen is at times the attentive biologist, observing the
smallest of details in the natural world, a slant of light, a cat preparing
to slay a snake. Like an anthropologist or geographer, however, Walter
sees a nature that is virtually always occupied by people and history: a zoo
in Kabul savaged by war, a backhoe in a drained lake, a human reaching out
to save the supposedly victimized snake. Like a psychologist, Walter
explores the peculiarities of memory and like a historian or philosopher, he
reaches back to the Greek gods and German and Chinese philosophers.
—Patricia
Okker
Days Like This Are Necessary is an
excellent collection that should not be missed.
—Midwest Book Review
Walter Bargen has published twelve books of poetry and two chapbooks.
His poems have recently appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry East,
Seattle Review and New Letters. He has won William Rockhill Nelson
Award, the Chester H. Jones Foundation Prize, the Quarter After Eight prize,
and a National Endowment for the Art Fellowship. In 2008, he was appointed
the first poet laureate of Missouri. His website is
www.walterbargen.com. He lives in
Ashland, Missouri with his wife, Bobette, twenty cats, and one dog.
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