It Was the Orange Persimmon of the Sun

Poetry. IT WAS THE ORANGE PERSIMMON OF THE SUN is an "in your face" confrontation with the mystery of our being here on earth in the early 21st century by a poet who, quietly and carefully over the past 35 years, has been carving his niche as our contemporary master of the extended meditation, the elegy and the book-length poem. From Deaths that Travel with the Weather and The Fourth Watch of the Night to The Work Ethic of the Common Fly (Settlement House) Louie Skipper has expanded the focus of his vision, which asserts itself most fully in IT WAS THE ORANGE PERSIMMON OF THE SUN. The book is a celebration of the extraordinary and the foibles of common man as well as the masters. Skipper's language carries us among the local butcher and doting aunts to Yeats and Dante, Rilke, Neruda and Robert Lowell; from Marcel Marceau and Nijinsky to Martin Luther King and "Bear" Bryant, invoking their presence via a unique and sometimes wildly off- beat sensibility. Deeply reflective but immersed in the things of this world and those not so far behind us the hourglass, "fat from candles," the lynching tree, and vintage automobiles pictured on the calendars of yesteryear Skipper travels back and forth in time and place, from the Alabama of the 1950s to the present day and beyond, from Dr. King's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and Oakmulgee Creek to the Sea of Gallilee, constellations and black holes into a spirited future joined with the ancient Chinese poet "...limping along / too late to use on himself the wisdom he has accrued..."