The Odor of Sanctity

Michael Heffernan was born in 1942 in Detroit, and grew up there, in a multi-ethnic working-class neighborhood, eight blocks from the Detroit River and Canada. He studied at the University of Detroit (A.B.) and the University of Massachusetts (Ph.D.). Since then he has resided mainly in Michigan, Kansas and Arkansas. He has taught the study and practice of poetry at the University of Arkansas (Fayetteville) since 1986. He regularly offers courses in Shakespeare, Yeats, Frost and Stevens. His poetry focuses on the way in which traditional poetic forms can still open routes toward invention and discovery. This new collection contains narratives, characters, masks, and free imaginations, expressing themselves in new dance-steps on the ground trod by the iamb. These acts of language, of words only, offer a new knowledge of reality, along with a vision of freedom and a kind of worldly holiness.