Water Ways

by William O'Daly, J.S. Graustein

Join William O'Daly and JS Graustein on their poetic explorations of New Hampshire's waterways. O'Daly's work as a Research Writer at the California Department of Water Resources during the state's multi-year drought and Graustein's training as an Aquatic Ecologist lend unique perspectives to the beauty of the Granite State's "blue spaces." From the Connecticut Lakes to the Seacoast, Otter Brook to the Salmon Falls River, and the circumnavigation of Lake Winnipesaukee, the poems, essays, and photographs in this book celebrate New Hampshire's gateways to "the most serene surface, the silence / of what we no longer remember: who we are, / to whom the loon calls across the emptiness."

104 pages, Paperback

Published April 14, 2017

About the author

William O’Daly was raised in the San Fernando Valley and as a late teen escaped the city on the backpacking trails of the southern Sierra Nevada. He attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, as an economics major but before the end of his freshman year began to study literature and write poetry. At UCSB he studied with poets Kenneth Rexroth, Alan Stephens, Fredrick Turner, and John Ridland, and with modernist critic Hugh Kenner; under friend and mentor Sam Hamill, he served as assistant editor of Spectrum magazine. In 1972 he left UCSB for Denver, Colorado, where he co-founded Copper Canyon Press. Upon returning to California, he studied with poet Philip Levine at CSU, Fresno, and there earned his B.A. He received his M.F.A. in Poetry, Translation, and Literary Editing from Eastern Washington University.

His published works include eight books of the late-career and posthumous poetry of Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda (Still Another Day, The Separate Rose, Winter Garden, The Sea and the Bells, The Yellow Heart, The Book of Questions, The Hands of Day, and World’s End), and two chapbooks of his own poems, The Whale in the Web and The Road to Isla Negra, from Copper Canyon Press and Folded Word Press, respectively. As a finalist for the 2006 Quill Award in Poetry, he was profiled by NBC news correspondent Mike Leonard on The Today Show. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, his poems, translations, essays, and reviews have been published in a wide range of journals and anthologies. With co-author Han-ping Chin, he recently completed a historical novel, This Earthly Life, set amid the fascinating and deadly Chinese Cultural Revolution. This Earthly Life was selected as a “Finalist” in Narrative magazine’s 2009 Fall Story Contest.

Currently a resident of the Sierra foothills of northern California, he has worked as a college professor, a literary and technical editor and writer, and an instructional designer, and has received national and regional honors for literary editing and instructional design.

Reviews

[Jimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful chapbook about the waterways of New Hampshire.

[Stephen Byrne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Apart from O'Daly's new book, Yarrow and Smoke, I have read every book of his including all his translations of Pablo Neruda and this book, Water Ways is another beauty. The poetry and photography are outstanding and I highly recommend you spend some time checking out O'Daly's work.