Poetry. Lahaina Noon is the moment when tropical sun shines straight down. No shadows darken that astonishing moment of illumination, and Hawai'i is where it happens. LAHAINA NOON, Eric Paul Shaffer's fifth book, contains poems of Maui that reveal a clarity and a sense of place as clear as lines of Billy Collins, profound as Gary Snyder, and direct as Jim Harrison. Shaffer received the 2002 Elliot Cades Award for Literature. "The arrival of a new collection of Shaffer's precise, graceful, witty, luminous work makes for a happy day in the Fowler household. No one is better at peeling away a single, ordinary moment until the whole world has been revealed"--Karen Joy Fowler.

Author City: HONOLULU, HI USA

Eric Paul Shaffer is author of five books of poetry, most recently LAHAINA NOON: NA MELE O MAUI: POEMS, which received an "Award of Excellence" in the Hawai'i Book Publishers Association's 2006 Ka Palapala Po'okela Book Awards. More than 250 of his poems have been published in local, national, and international magazines, and in the anthologies 100 Poets Against the War and The Soul Unearthed. His short fiction appeared in Bamboo Ridge, Bakunin, Prose Ax, and Natural Bridge, and in two chapbooks of fiction selected from BURN & LEARN: You Are Here (Obscure Publications) and The Felony Stick (Leaping Dog Press). Shaffer received the 2002 Elliot Cades Award for Literature, and he was a 2006 Fellow at the annual Summer Fishtrap Writers Workshop and Retreat at Wallowa Lake near Enterprise, Oregon. He lives with his wife Veronica and two rambunctious sister cats on a ridge overlooking Kalihi. He teaches composition and literature at Honolulu Community College.