Dancing with Columbus

Dancing with Columbus gathers together fifty-two beautifully crafted new poems by award-winning Minnesota poet, translator, and editor Robert Hedin. Employing spare, imagistic language, Hedin explores the themes of loss and reclamation, the integrity of everyday events, and our proper place in the natural world, with its seasonal turnings and yearly migrations. In one poem, an elderly man, newly retired, gains a new perspective on life watching primates at the zoo. In the title poem, a retired boxer teaches some youngsters to dance at an abandoned boatyard. Visions of sunrise across a field at dawn, a day at the races, golden pollen in the air--these and many other quotidian events are given depth and brought into sharper focus by the poet's discerning lense.