Sally's Hair: Poems

Let me stay there for a while, while evening

Gathers in the sky and daylight lingers on the hills.

There's something in the air, something I can't quite see,

Hiding behind this stock of images, this language

Culled from all the poems I've ever loved.

John Koethe's remarkable gift to readers is an elegiac poetry that explores the transitory nature of ordinary human experience. The beautiful poems in this new collection celebrate the creative power of human beings, the only weapon we possess against time's relentless "slow approach to anonymity and death."

Of all Koethe's books, SALLY'S HAIR is probably his most human and various. He is well known for his meditative lyrics and this volume begins with a brilliant series of such poems, among them "Eros and the Everyday." This is followed by "The Unlasting," a long poem devoted to time and experience, and a third section comprised of more public poems, some of them political, such as "The Maquiladoras" and "Poetry and the War." This perceptive, luminescent collection concludes with a group of vivid and conversational poems, recollections, including the gems "Proust" and "HAMLET."

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Powerful and intimate.”

John Koethe is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the first Poet Laureate of Milwaukee. His collection Falling Water won the Kingsley Tufts Award. North Point North: New and Selected Poems was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.