Böcker av Eric Paul Shaffer

A Million-Dollar Bill surveys our lives in America up close and personal from the first young summer taste in "Watermelon Seeds" to the hopeful hand-made creation of legal tender to purchase the necessities and accessories of the American Dream in the title poem.Quirky, original, and astute, this expansive and engaging poetry collection by Eric Paul Shaffer entertains even as each poem presses readers to pause and think for a moment.From love to death to parking the car, from rain to ice to sky to falling stars, the little insights that grow large in language are here for the reading. Best of all, with A Million-Dollar Bill, you can keep the change.

Green Leaves: New and Selected Poems collects work from Eric Paul Shaffer's seven volumes and thirty-five years of publication. On voyages around the Pacific Rim, from California to Okinawa to Hawai'i, Shaffer's sharp eye for natural and human detail delights and illuminates. A charter member of the "Clear Pool School," Shaffer writes direct, profound, and often funny poems celebrating the American vernacular and encouraging a broader sense of the human, humane, ecological, and planetary.

One evening on L¿haina's Front Street, as Shaffer walked to an evening with friends, someone passing on the sidewalk commented, "The islands are even further west than I thought." Those accidental words, like poetry, shifted his perspective once again regarding the place he lives. Even Further West is a collection of poems written of, in, and on the Hawaiian islands. Companion volume to L¿haina Noon, this collection includes poems striving to encounter and reveal the actual place and people hidden behind the pictures and posters, the myths and misunderstandings, of America's only tropical state. Years ago assigned by a keen reviewer to the "Clear Pool School" of poetry, Shaffer's work again presents sharply detailed and unexpected scenes of how the blue world looks as a bouncing inflatable globe on a day at the beach, beneath a single streetlight on a dark upcountry road, after the surprise of "NO TRESPASSING" signs between slippahs and the sand, beyond our perverse thirst for apocalypse even in paradise. Yet a love for the land, people, friends, and significant others on the islands shines within these pages as well, in dry grass or rain, under plumeria and kiawe, and leads to lives that grow and flourish in the same landscape. These poems encourage locals and visitors to the islands to stand on the sand, soil, and sidewalks of the islands of Hawai'i, on the shifting sea-drawn line on the sand before the deeps where we play, swim, and surf, and see exactly where we are.