In Other Days by Roger Craik

“Every moment of Roger Craik’s In Other Days is an event of inviolable music, golden, as the best of music always is, with both finitude and duration. And I use the word “golden” most particularly here, as these poems–whether urban or pastoral, whether fond or furious–impart a radiance to their idiom identical to that burnished radiance we find in the paintings of Samuel Palmer or the enigmas of Elgar. Craik adventures far beyond pathos and nostalgia, into something like a prospect of eternity. I am both thrilled and consoled by this poetry.”

—Donald Revell

“Roger Craik’s In Other Days collages remembrances, art, history, and travel into a rich and engaging tapestry that stands within and outside time. The poems are curiously apocalyptic at times, though each ending seems simply to lead to another. A striking collection, this book of terminuses will keep you guessing what glorious new image, evocation, or historical nexus waits on the pages to come!”

—Kyle McCord

“Every road / led out of Leicester into Leicestershire,” exclaims the speaker of Roger Craik’s measured new collection, an utterance which is also a lens through which the tome’s whole might be viewed. In other words, each pathway leading elsewhere leads back in, or perhaps, toward the periphery of in-ness — toward the center of memory and locality. “Leicester” in this broad sense (or as the poem is called, “Home”) methodizes the speaker’s approach to the various geographies these poems inhabit, which range from Portugal to Turkey to, eventually, the United States. These terrestrial and metaphysical wanderings — patient, reflective, and often nonlinear — shed light as much on our own times as they do on the distances their title seems to underscore. In Other Days is, then, a song for the precarity of the present, even as it recalls the ravages, and enrichments, of personal and historical pasts.

—John James

Roger Craik, Professor Emeritus of English at Kent State University, Ohio, has written four collections of poetry: I Simply Stared (2002), Rhinoceros in Clumber Park (2003), The Darkening Green (2004), and Down Stranger Roads (2014), along with two chapbooks, Those Years (2007), (translated into Bulgarian in 2009), and Of England Still (2009). His poetry has appeared in several national poetry journals, such as The Formalist, Fulcrum, The Literary Review, The Atlanta Review, The London Grip and The London Magazine.

English by birth and educated at the universities of Reading and Southampton, he has worked as a journalist, TV critic and chess columnist. Before coming to the USA in 1991, he worked in Turkish universities and was awarded a Beineke Fellowship to Yale in 1990. He is widely traveled, having visited North Yemen, Egypt, South Africa, Tibet, Nepal, Japan, Bulgaria (where he taught during spring 2007 on a Fulbright Scholarship), the United Arab Emirates, Austria, Croatia and Romania, (where from 2013-14 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Oradea).

He is glad every day that he is living in the USA. He watches the birds throughout the year, with joy.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 76 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-367-6

$16

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