About	Ordering Books	Events	Home
	Hummingbird Press Poets of the Monterey Bay

 

Fossil Honey Poems by Charles Atkinson

The poems in this volume are frankly familial.  They trace the dissolution of a long marriage, the reckoning entailed by parents’ deaths, the unstable terrain of parenting as sons grow toward men.  A collection like this might be dark.  But Charles Atkinson also asks the question, “Really, who can love the world / and disdain himself forever?” Through scrupulous attention—to the heart, to the landscape, and to language—these poems earn their slow way to compassion and forgiveness, for others and for self.  Fossil Honey affirms the healing potential of a reflective, articulated life.

Charles Atkinson’s first collection, The Only Cure I Know (San Diego Poets Press), received the American Book Series award for poetry; a chapbook, The Best of Us on Fire, won the Wayland Press competition.  A third volume, Because We Are Men, was awarded the Sow’s Ear Poetry Prize.  He has also received the Stanford Prize, the Comstock Review Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Award (SUNY Farmingdale), the Emily Dickinson Award (Universities West Press) and The Ledge Poetry Prize.  He teaches writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Read the review of Fossil Honey by Joan Zimmerman on Ariadne's Web.

Fossil Honey by Charles Atkinson.  November 2006. 96 pages, paperback, $12, ISBN 0-9716373-9-3

Poems by Charles Atkinson

Copyright 2006