Just in time for spring (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), on March 21, 2013, Silver Birch Press will release Gerald Locklin: New and Selected Poems, edited and with a foreword by Paul Kareem Tayyar. The collection includes over 100 of Locklin’s poems spanning five decades — from 1967 to 2007. As Tayyar states in his foreword. “Read them and be reminded of the blessings of a life well lived, courtesy of one of America’s finest poets.”
Here is a sampling from the upcoming collection — a personal favorite for its humor and insight.
IT TAKES, IT TAKES A BUSY MAN
by Gerald Locklin
He hadn’t made a dent
In his list for weeks.
One of the items was “Call Z.”
Then one day Z’s wife called to say
That Z had died.
He was ashamed to catch himself
Indulging in a feeling of accomplishment
As he crossed “Call Z” off his list.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Gerald Locklin is a professor emeritus of English at California State University, Long Beach, where he taught full-time from 1965-2007, retains his office and contact information, and still teaches an occasional class as needed. He has published fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews prolifically in periodicals and in over a hundred and fifty books, chapbooks, and broadsides. Recent or upcoming books include a fiction e-Book, The Sun Also Rises in the Desert, from Mendicant Bookworks; a collection of poems, Deep Meanings: Selected Poems, 2008-2013, from PRESA Press; three simultaneously released novellas from Spout Press; and a French collection of his prose, Candy Bars: Le Dernier des Damnes, due May 7, 2013, from 13e Note Press, Paris. Event Horizon Press released new editions of A Simpler Time, A Simpler Place and Hemingway Colloquium: The Poet Goes to Cuba in 2011; Coagula Press released the first of two volumes of his Complete Coagula Poems; and From a Male Perspective appeared from PRESA Press.
Silver Birch Press 