Approximately Paradise

$19.95

by Floyd Skloot

This new collection from award-winning poet Floyd Skloot, tracks life in all its mixed possibilities, taking hard but necessary glances at our ever-changing world. Concerned with the fluidity and fragility of memory, Skloot’s new poems move between the realms of health and illness; past and present; remembering and forgetting; and the stability of change.

Skloot is a versatile wordsmith who gives us lyric, narrative, and formal poems—poems in which lessons are learned from what is lost. His home, a fir and pine forest in western Oregon, provides the anchor for his work and lives at the heart of this collection. Dead artists, poets, writers, composers, actors, and even major league shortstops return to visit Skloot in the remote woods where he lives, and teach him about the sweet rewards of living in the moment.

In Skloot’s poems, we hear melodies interrupted, beauty resonating between those empty spaces and the insouciant chortle of a parrot who leaves us yearning for more of that indescribable something we’re all searching for. Gauguin in Oregon, cello music vibrating in blue and gold, a mother disguised as a scowling gypsy jangling her tambourine: these are the images of Skloot’s world, a place where life’s tender moments can also be robust and bold.

by Floyd Skloot

This new collection from award-winning poet Floyd Skloot, tracks life in all its mixed possibilities, taking hard but necessary glances at our ever-changing world. Concerned with the fluidity and fragility of memory, Skloot’s new poems move between the realms of health and illness; past and present; remembering and forgetting; and the stability of change.

Skloot is a versatile wordsmith who gives us lyric, narrative, and formal poems—poems in which lessons are learned from what is lost. His home, a fir and pine forest in western Oregon, provides the anchor for his work and lives at the heart of this collection. Dead artists, poets, writers, composers, actors, and even major league shortstops return to visit Skloot in the remote woods where he lives, and teach him about the sweet rewards of living in the moment.

In Skloot’s poems, we hear melodies interrupted, beauty resonating between those empty spaces and the insouciant chortle of a parrot who leaves us yearning for more of that indescribable something we’re all searching for. Gauguin in Oregon, cello music vibrating in blue and gold, a mother disguised as a scowling gypsy jangling her tambourine: these are the images of Skloot’s world, a place where life’s tender moments can also be robust and bold.

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About the Author

Floyd Skloot is the author of seventeen books, including two volumes of poems from Tupelo Press, and the acclaimed memoirs In the Shadow of Memory (2003) and The Wink of the Zenith (2008). The stories in Cream of Kohlrabi originally appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ontario Review, North American Review, Glimmer Train, Witness, and other magazines. He and his wife, the artist Beverly Hallberg, live in Portland, Oregon. With his daughter Rebecca Skloot, he edited Best American Science Writing 2011.

Floyd Skloot was named one of fifty of the most inspiring authors in the world by Poets & Writers (January/February 2010): “Despite virus-induced brain damage, he writes with surprising tenderness and candor about recreating a life for himself and, in the process, makes us think about our own.”

Advanced Praise:

“Skloot is such a fine writer that he can—and does—write about eating ‘baloney and eggs’ and makes it seem fascinating.”  —Publishers Weekly

“Throughout the book, natural images like the sound of the sea about…anchoring self in landscape, flora, fauna. Mind and memory rooted.” –Vince Gotera, North American Review

“… it takes great skill to respect the suffering of the sick and their families while also grasping and transforming it into a work of art. Floyd Skloot is the first poet I have run across in possession of such powers. Though far too many poets have tried to paste pathos on the page, hoping the overwhelm with raw power and impress with a rather egotistic display of profound feeling, Skloot impresses with an ear attuned to the counterpoint of sentence rhythm, rhyme, and meter, and with the true artist’s commitment to making the most private and personal suffering revealable to others through a selfless attention to the vivid scene and dispassionate narrative.” —James Wilson, Notre Dame Review

“In poem after amazing poem in Approximately Paradise, Floyd Skloot deploys form (a sonnet on his mother’s Alzheimer’s, a long narrative on the ghost of the legendary Dodger fielder Pee Wee Reese), continuously seeking that place where, Rilke tells us, beauty is born out of just-bearable terror. And again and again, he finds that place; finds it a place suffused with tenderness.” –Gregory Orr

The Harvard Review called Floyd Skloot “A poet of singular skill and subtle intelligence,” and radiating from the center of Approximately Paradise are poems that earn this praise by emoting universal themes like a mother’s love, acceptance, wholeness—themes that succeed in reminding us of an elegant and simple paradise that is always within our reach.

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-25-5