Highwater

Although Lee Gerlach has been a prolific poet for forty years, publishing often and widely in literary magazines, Highwater is his first full-length book. The book is not really a collection of selected poems, as more than half of the poems come from a series of over 250 ghazals that Gerlach has written since 1985. The ghazal is one of the major forms of Persian and Urdu poetry. Gerlach has adapted the form, dispensing with its complex meter and refrain, and so putting the emphasis on the poems' imagery, spiritual yearnings, and--the most striking feature of the ghazals of Hafiz, Ghalib, and other masters of the form--the beautiful and strange associations from couplet to couplet. In the first section of Highwater, Gerlach shows his mastery of the forms of English poetry in writing of his life in California, New Mexico, and Wisconsin, and in the third section, translations of Tu Fu and Han Yu, he joins the ranks of the great translators--Pound, Bynner, Rexroth--of Chinese poetry into English. "This poetry is of tremendously high concentration and lucidity. It's sealed linguistically well enough to make it empirically impervious to damage by time, literary fashion, or oblivion. It is a world, indeed, which every poet would love to create--I, for one, certainly would--and that every reader would love to inhabit." -Joseph Brodsky, United States Poet Laureate (1992)Lee Gerlach is the author of 'Highwater', published 2002 under ISBN 9781590510223 and ISBN 1590510224.