Award winning poetry critic Ange Mlinko wrote of Parsons and his work, “The Renaissance man was once a courtly ideal; Parsons shows that it is a democratic ideal too—warm-blooded, muscular, as companionable on the page as in the flesh.” Both tangible and cerebral, Parsons’s poetry lifts its readers into a new, transformational reality with a depth of insight that is truly exceptional. Reaching For Longer Water brings the reader, the most compelling of his poems from his previous four collections, poems hailed by poetry luminaries, Edward Hirsch, Stanley Plumly, Robert Phillips, and Paul Mariani. THE FRANK GAZE OF WOMEN After Baudelaire’s “Exotic Scent” Yes, yes, they bestow delights— not only in the seedy way we all know: they plant something in the littoral vacancy and in an instant there is an ineffable fire—that forging force on which so much more depends than wheelbarrows &amp; chickens.

Reaching for Longer Water: New and Selected Poems

Literature & Fiction

Parsons, David Mercier

Poetry

Texas Review Press

Editing Sky: Poems

The title of this collection of poems employs the word mourning in a manner that expands the strict definition of the word and crosses the ordinary boundaries of the senses, where color, time, and place are triggers to memory and experience. The reader will be taken on an odyssey including sixteenth-century England, the ancient hills of Spain, a Renoir painting in Ft. Worth, a precarious cliffside inn on California's Highway One, a rare-book library in the heart of Houston, a high-school gym in Georgia, an East Texas pine forest, and the violet crowned hills of Austin. The forays collected in this volume always return to Texas, most notably Austin, where the power of childhood memories shed light on the author's life experiences during the pivotal periods of the sixties and seventies. Examples include poems chronicling the day of the University of Texas tower sniper tragedy and the award winning poem "Night Hawk," recording the time that the poet ran face to chest into LBJ in a popular restaurant, a poem, like the writer's collection, recapturing unique and complicated times with irony, wit, and joyful mourning.

Color of Mourning: Poems

Parsons’ third collection of poems, as in his previous books, carries the reader too many geographies, both physical and cerebral. The poems, perhaps his most eclectic and revealing, return to Austin, Texas, in the turbulent and carnal sixties, the sublime Hill Country streams, north to Montana’s Mystic Lake and hallowed Indian battle grounds, and with the deftness of a wise and worldly guide, you will travel the tender valves of the heart, where all creativity finds its passion, to the very quay, that zone between reality and the possible, what Garcia Lorca called duende. FEATHERING DEEP After Edward Hirsch’s “The Angel and the Demon” I believe it to be unlike any other conveyance the manner in which it carries us in upon its own silence the way an idea drifts into the grey divide where we find ourselves in that sacred state—easing quietly into the dark duende to unconscious understanding a lone canoe at midnight—blades paddling deep—smoothly and deftly feathering that largest of bodies

Feathering Deep

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Parsons, David Mercier. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Parsons, David Mercier

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Parsons, David Mercier. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Reaching for Longer Water: New and Selected Poems

Editing Sky: Poems

Editing Sky: Poems

Color of Mourning: Poems

Color of Mourning: Poems

Feathering Deep

Feathering Deep