![[logo] Crest of the University of Wisconsin-Madison](/images/crest.png)
![[logo] Ask a Librarian](/images/ask.png)
« Back to All News Releases
Parallel Press publishes 'Heaven'ly poetry chapbook
By Sara Johansen
Library Communications
Posted 10/9/2006
MADISON, Wis. -- The blending of nature and personal interaction is at the heart of the poems in the latest Parallel Press chapbook, The Discovery of Heaven.
With the keen eye of a quiet observer, Richard Hedderman describes both the serene and the charged conditions of nature in many of his poems. Recounting the carriage of a fish pulled from water in his poem "Steelhead," Hedderman entwines the moment's trauma and grace writing, "When it rips the surface, / the thick tail shudders, / with a brazen slash / salutes the greensward / and the roll of the hills / and smacks the untried air."
In the book's title poem, "The Discovery of Heaven," Hedderman's tone soothes in his description of a moment spent with someone in the sun: "Then heaven became a place / to lie down in for an hour, / with the long summer sun on our faces, / amid the drone of the bees in a tended garden, / and above us the vitreous savannas of cloud."
Hedderman is a three-time Poetry Fellow at the New York State Writers' Institute under the directorship of Irish poet John Montague. His poems have appeared in numerous national and international publications including Chautauqua Literary Journal, South Dakota Review, CutBank, Stolen Island Review, Puckerbrush Review and the Welsh language literary journal, Skald. He has read his poems for the "Poetry at Noon" series at the Library of Congress, and his work has been collected in the anthology In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare.
The Parallel Press is an imprint of the University of Wisconsin Madison Libraries. The Discovery of Heaven is its 45th poetry chapbook.
Poetry chapbooks may be purchased in groups of six for $50, or $10 each. For more information, visit http://parallelpress.library.wisc.edu/chapbooks/poetry.
Orders may be sent to:
The Parallel Press
372 Memorial Library
728 State Street
Madison, WI 53706
Phone: (608) 262-2600
A selection from The Discovery of Heaven:
Choosing A Stone
Go out and gather stones
when it's raining,
on a day when a single gesture
anchors the world, and a stone
reflects the deeper contemplation
of whoever cradles it,
shining and wet in his palm.
Its silence is of men
who have fished too long,
of hunters who return home
through bare trees.
Lover of animals, namer of stars,
choose a stone, dense with the weight
of an unanswered question.
Plunge it into a lake
where the dark surface
has been smoothed by cold.
The world shudders in its absence
which the widening rings
quietly confirm.
