Long Lens

New and Selected Poems

Long Lens: New & Selected Poems represents nearly forty years of Peter Makuck’s work. France, Spain, Ecuador, and the American southwest; parents, children, and friends; seascapes and landscapes; birds, fish, and animals: Peter Makuck interweaves the ordinary and the visionary through familiar human experiences of everyday pleasure and pain. In language precise, surprising, and rich with imagery, his poems respond to spiritual longing, the need for wisdom, love and loss, violence and transcendence. He depicts the aftermath of the 1970 killings at Kent State University; stories inherent in paintings, photos, and Anasazi petroglyphs; scuba-diving on an offshore shipwreck; flying through a storm in a friend’s small plane; and rescuing a boy caught in a riptide. Twenty-five new poems open the volume and find the extraordinary in the ordinary with narratives about back roads, prison inmates clearing ditches, skiing in France, precise observations of spinner sharks, a gray fox, a spider, a pelican tangled in fishline, memories of one’s first pair of glasses, and the deaths of college housemates. Peter Makuck founded Tar River Poetry and was its editor for nearly thirty years while teaching at East Carolina University from 1976 to 2006. In 2008 he held the Lee Smith chair in creative writing at North Carolina State University. His poetry and reviews continue to appear in prestigious journals where Makuck carries the torch of the lyrical, narrative image-driven poet. This New & Selected will give readers and critics a chance to reflect on Makuck's four decade contribition to poetry.