Poetry. These urban pastoral mediatations are at once engaged in the search for transcendance, and pointedly unwilling to surrender any of their attachments to the earth. Meaning seeps in between visions of a sumptuous Babylon and the "spiked wire/and old pipes" of the city garden-- between the dream of the gorgeous Roman ruins, and "the weight of everything that pulls me down to ruin." Determined to fit the whole world into his poems lest the one essential thing slip by, Gasper surrenders only to the "abiding imperative to get it right. Which is, of course, what real writing is all about"--Mary Oliver.

Author City: LONG BEACH, CA USA

Frank X. Gaspar is the author of four books of poetry: THE HOLYOKE (1988), Mass for the Grace of a Happy Death (1995), A Field Guide to the Heavens (2002) and NIGHT OF A THOUSAND BLOSSOMS (2004), as well as the novel Leaving Pico (1999). His writing has won numerous awards and prizes, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, the 1988 Morse Poetry Prize, the 1994 Anhinga Prize, the 1999 Brittingham Prize in Poetry, a California Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the California Book Award, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Award. Gaspar's work has appeared widely in magazines and journals throughout the country, and he has been included in multiple editions of the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Born and raised in Provincetown, Massachusetts, he holds a Masters of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from University of California, Irvine. He now lives in southern California.