Stemming the Flow

How do you summarize poetry? How do you summarize a life? Ducker explores these questions in this moving ode to the human experience. Divided into five parts and themes, with each part exploring a different stage in life, this is a poetry collection with a distinctive voice. Ducker has a nostalgic and witty style that will resonate with readers from all walks of life.

About the Author :
Bruce Ducker is the prize-winning author of eight novels and a book of short fictions. He has over 100 poems and stories in the nation's leading literary journals, including The New Republic; the Yale, Southern, Sewanee, Literary, and Hudson Reviews, and Poetry Magazine. A jazz pianist, he's also written the book, music and lyrics for three musical comedies. Born in New York City, he lives in Colorado.

Review :
"Stemming the Flow is unusual for both its range and its craft. Ducker is a close observer of himself, as a poet must be, but also of what exists outside of himself, as a novelist must be. Across a range of witty light verse, passionate love poems, meditations on aging, books, music, the natural world and more, he is therefore far better than most poets at evoking the dramatic dimensions of our lives. "Unlike most novelists who turn to verse, Ducker knows his versecraft cold and gives us well-turned lines in both meter and free verse throughout. American poetry needs more work like this, which is so measured and meaningful that it brings everything it touches, even death, into harmonious relationship, thereby transforming mere experience into an intense, focused linguistic encounter with the world. This is the kind of writing that deserves the name 'poetry.'" --David J. Rothman, David Rothman author of six books of poetry and Unlocking the Secrets of English Verse, a poetry textbook. "From deeply poignant poems about the loss of a spouse to a brilliant retelling of the fall of Ikaros, from playful poems about scarecrows and Smith-Coronas to a sonnet on Bach, Bruce Ducker brings a wealth of erudition, formal skill, and sparkling wit to a remarkable range of subjects. Readers disenchanted with the aridities of postmodernism will find much to remind them of the essential pleasures of poetry in Stemming the Flow." -John Brehm, author of No Day at the Beach and Dharma Talk; winner of the Brittingham Prize "I like your poems... I'm amazed by your rhyming. So few people these days attempt formal poems.'Dappled' is my favorite [and] 'Willy Loman' is fun." -- Donald Hall, U. S. Poet Laureate, 2006-2008; Winner, National Medal of Honor "I would characterize this book by a single spoiler-lurking deep in these varied and always vital poems is this: "I've gone from partner to partner, / Looking for fidelity." The gentle irony, the unjudgmental but arresting awareness of the poet is key to these major if sometimes tiny Ovidian tales and talismans, these poems about the unceasing changingness of consciousness. Exactly my story, and everyone's." --Bin Ramke, author of Earth on Earth, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition and the Iowa Poetry Prize. "Bruce Ducker is a mellow musician. He brings us great new arrangements on familiar themes of love and yearning--especially yearning--but also funny or piercing takes on the quirks of life that we would otherwise have missed. To read him is to love him." --Ruth R. Wisse is Professor Emerita of Eastern and Comparative Literature at Harvard University "Edward Lear meets Phillip Larkin in these poems by turn whimsical and shot through with the 'glass pianos' of an intelligent, provocative nostalgia-for one's past, for music, for family, for place. There is no subject too quotidian-a traffic jam, a simple peach-or too ineffable (the theory of relativity, the vicissitudes of love, the 'abiding flow' of time) for Ducker's perspicacious attention. Stemming the Flow is an irresistible debut from an established author of fiction, and Ducker's training in prose keeps these lyrics well-paced, with spot-on timing. The poems in Stemming the Flow are alight with Chekhovian clarity and a poetic wit all their own." --Lisa Russ Spaar, Author of Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems and Paradise Close: A Novel, Professor of English, University of Virginia.