Poetry. Book with accompanying CD. Michael Daley's MOONLIGHT IN THE REDEMPTIVE FOREST drives a stake into the heart of complacency. Its theme is war, though not warfare. From spoken and unspoken minefields in drug addled families of America, from final solutions at Auschwitz and Eastern Europe, the savage firebombing of Tokyo, the poems depict survivors and victims with compassion and, ultimately, hope. Its longest poem evokes in narrative form a legend from Daley's South Boston Irish heritage, where poverty and suspicion overshadowed innocence. These poems should be heard--a CD, with music by Brad Killion, comes with the book--and savored for their crisp and daring language; not paeans to the virtuous triumphant, these are songs of the wounded who sing in their chains.
Author City: Mt. Vernon, WA USA
Michael Daley was born in Boston, and is a graduate of UMass with an MFA from the University of Washington. He's worked as a laborer, taxi driver, waiter, tree-planter, editor, Poet-in-the-schools, and high school English teacher. The author of three books of poems, a book of essays and several chapbooks, his work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, Manoa, Alaskan Quarterly Review, Nebraska Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, Raven Chronicles, Seattle Review, and on Garrison Keilor's Writer's Almanac. In 2001 he received a Fulbright grant to live in Hungary for a year. Twice the National Endowment of the Humanities has awarded his work, as has the Seattle Arts Commission, Bumbershoot, and the Fessenden Foundation. He received a grant from Artists Trust to produce the book MOONLIGHT IN THE REDEMPTIVE FOREST's accompanying CD, "Frankie the Milkman's Song & Other Poems."
Reviews and Other Links
http://www.audioport.org/index.php?op=program-info&program_id=31768&nav=&