Böcker av John Skoyles

"Yes and No is a book about looking back and looking forward. Many of the poems deal with the loss of friends and relatives whose spirits remain in the poet's life in memory and even apparition. As the title connotes, the collection is about affirmation and negation: there are love poems and poems of the devastating loss of love and poems of passion and the dwindling of it. A spiritual thread runs through the book as well, as seen in the opening poem, "Prayer at the Masked Ball," and in the question asked in the title poem: "are we connected to the infinite, or not?"--

Driven is a travelogue in which the narrator reviews his life in the course of twenty four hours. A professor at a small college hopes for something different to happen on the last day of the academic year. And it does. When he leaves his home on Cape Cod for Boston where he teaches, he enters a world both real and imaginary. Two of his passengers are his dead parents. The third is the love of his life from years ago. He navigates issues of loss, class, fame and family as he passes familiar landmarks, stops at the same coffee shops, recalls the dance at the dump, the stories of barflies and entrepreneurs, eccentric colleagues and his newfound sobriety. Is it fiction or nonfiction? That depends on whether or not you believe in ghosts.