Woman and the Sea: Selected Poems

Poetry. Michael Mott's poems are strong in all the qualities that make good poetry: formal beauty, wise sense, and well-drawn imagery. He speaks to and for our time, from deep wells of history, with a firm understanding that the present is always an experience of the past-Guy Davenport. In this extensive selection, Mott tempers dense, often historical or literary subject matter with a Joycean ear for living language: to scream in the mosquitoes' wail or burn aglow / in fireflies crossing now the wastes you know / cool lids of twilight Chickamauga's risen trees (Chickamauga). As George Garrett writes in his introduction, There is a subtle and diverse music playing in all these poems, a rich virtuosity (occasionally elaborate) of end rhymes and internal rhymes, masculine and feminine, and echoes. Mott was born in London in 1930, and currently lives in Williamsburg, Virginia.