Selected poems - When Steve McCown finally gathered together the pages for this book he was probably a bit surprised to realize he had been a poet for the better part of his life. What possessed him all those years? A courage and curiosity to see where distant roads and nearby doorways might lead. An eye for the authentic and for what matters most. An urge to find words--the most precise, most meaningful ones. A need to structure small individual works into the framework of an unfolding life story. Many of the revelations he provides in these poems are now mine.-Emilio DeGrazia, Emeritus Professor of English, Winona State UniversityIn the middle of Steve McCown's luminous book of poetry, there's a hurricane. After the storm, the poet's eye catches a bright yellow hummingbird feeder still unbroken amid the wreckage: "Its bright inner life, in the gloom, /was still visible, alluring./ We-displaced from our home, /adrift on the streets-hovered near." This graceful book performs a kind of poetic salvage operation, rescuing small moments of beauty and meaning from the wreckage of life and the rising flood of time.Rob Hardy, Poet Laureate of Northfield, Minneso