Red Hawk's poetry has long been acclaimed by his fellow poets, Pulitzer Prize winners and National Book Award Finalists, for its gutsy honesty, plain language, and consummate skill.
Never is that poetic skill in rendering the truth more evident than in this, his fifth book of poetry. It has some of his best poems ever, including a group of sonnets on which he's been working for thirty years. Now, in the words of Miller Williams and Coleman Barks, Red Hawk is the only American poet doing groundbreaking, award worthy work in the sonnet form popularized by Robert Frost and William Shakespeare.
Red Hawk was the Hodder Fellow at Princeton University (1992-93) and currently a full professor at U. of Arkansas, Monticello. Author of 5 collections of poetry, he has been published in The Atlantic, Poetry, and Kenyon Review, and others journals. Red Hawk has given readings with Allen Ginsberg, Rita Dove, Miller Williams, Tess Gallagher, and Coleman Barks, and more than 70 solo-readings in the U.S. He has practiced self-observation for over 30 years, under the guidance of the Gurdjieff Society of Arkansasa, meditation master Osho Rajneesh, and spiritual teacher, Lee Lozowick.
If you don't have the connections to get a CD of this UAM professor of English reading his poems, don't worry - the poems stand on their own. I wrote a profile/review for the Free Press: http://ronaldsitton.wordpress.com/200...
I'm not an avid poetry reader, but pass on this prize to your own demise.