Recounting the Seasons: Collected Poems, 1958-2003

"From the beginning, Engels has written with his tongue in his cheek—'Mine is the manner of fly fishermen without fish.' If you get it, you really get it—which is to say that you find this poetry simultaneously exhilarating, funny, heartbreaking, and deeply, oddly, singularly comforting. To appreciate how serious John Engels is you must first understand how hilarious he is. Both the comedy and the seriousness reside in the language—in the diction and the syntax." —from the Foreword by David Huddle

Recounting the Seasons gathers together the work of noted American poet John Engels. Engels's writing is distinguished by its astonishing range—long, short, easy, difficult, philosophical, casual, despairing, joyful, silly, bawdy, heartbreaking, angry, affectionate, uplifting, abrasive, sexy, chaste, polite, and bad-mannered. Arranged chronologically, this book contains nearly all of the poems that Engels has published and features a section of new and previously unpublished poems.

"What a great pleasure it is to have this collected edition of John Engels's poems. Back in the noble days of modernism, when we had such fearless exponents of poetic form and language as Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, and Ted Roethke, Engels was an acknowledged master. His poems remain as strong and compelling as ever. His expressly demonstrative relationship to nature is entirely cogent and stimulating. Engels will always be an American treasure. His poems are a joy for all readers and a model for the young." —Hayden Carruth

"John Engels is one of the handful of essential poets of his generation. What is distinctive about Engels's poetry is that it has not only sustained its power and craft over the many years of his efforts but also enhanced it." —Sydney Lea

"It is quite a joyous realization that the collected poems of John Engels have come together to comprise a rich volume. This is not just a significant moment for contemporary poetry; it is notable in the complete annals of American poetry—the coming together of all the resonant, inventive work of one of our most prodigiously gifted and dedicated poets." —Paul Zimmer