Kirk Westphal's collection Bodies of Wood and Water takes a paradoxically solid and fluid place in the canon of American transcendental literature. These poems transcend observational distance and merge an intellectually soulful sensibility with all that it experiences. We become not only one with the world, but also startlingly one with our inexplicable selves. The persona of the humbly assumed "Day's Work," sings, "I unfurl into the billow of air / then water then Dark / then me." Whitman would applaud. -Jack Ridl, author of Practicing to Walk Like a Heron (Wayne State University Press) Co-recipient of the year's gold medal for poetry from ForeWord Reviews
Kirk Westphal's Bodies of Wood and Water sings one and many meditations. In poem after poem tenderly, exactly, metaphorically, and directly made from the forests, lakes, and rivers of his life, he guides his reader into deeper and deeper layers of wisdom and wonder. Pluck a passage from absolutely any page in the book-"I am the Mobius curve / of a meadowlark's song / if she whispered it outside / your open window at sunrise"-and that reader will hear a soothing and pitch-perfect music deftly composed of hard-earned experience and indefatigable contemplation.
-D. R. James, author of If god were gentle and Split-Level
Quivering at the sight of a dew-covered blossom, prepare to be undone until your new green shoots become a moss-covered tree. Feel the grain as Westphal woos the nearby stream, dancing with her until nakedness is form and form is nakedness.
-Mark Daniel Seiler, author of Sighing Woman Tea and River's Child
Possibilities abound in the confluence of wood, body, and water living in Kirk Westphal's graceful language. In this collection, the interior landscape coexists with the exterior, and the ephemeral with the physical. One life form becomes another: "These boards might have become paper / but do not choose their resurrection." This book shapes the course of water-and the course of life.
-Tanya Muzumdar, Editor of Dunes Review
About the Author: Kirk Westphal's poetry reflects his life's work and his reverence for waters and the forests that protect them. He is an environmental consultant who advises government agencies around the world on water management, and who is also currently building a timber frame cabin on a remote trout stream in the hills of Western Massachusetts. He has won national awards for professional journal articles on water management and is working on another book on the restoration of a small patch of forest. He is a frequent contributor to Dunes Review, and his poems have also appeared in The Road Not Taken and Albatross. He was a winner of the Plein Air Poetry Contest sponsored by the Fruitlands Museum in Massachusetts in 2012 and has read a comic poem about his boyhood idols, the Chicago Cubs, on National Public Radio. His first book, No Ordinary Game, a celebration of great moments in sports that happen to everyday people, was published by Rowman and Littlefield in June of 2015. He lives between an orchard and a lake in Stow, Massachusetts.
