From Venice to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, from one disappearing town in the marshes to another, John Drury, in his first full-length book of poems, navigates through the twisty channels of memory and perception, loss and desire, where what's real and what's a wavering reflection attract and perplex the bedazzled explorer. In this flat terrain, poised before floodtide, children learn to write longhand and to take off each other's clothes, adolescents goof off at menial jobs, a lyric soprano loses her nerve and possibly her voice, husbands and wives drift apart in their separate obsessions and pursuits. Like a camera's viewfinder in which two halves of an image must line up perfectly to come into focus, Drury pieces together the past and the present into "one likeness that is whole."

"Drury is a responsible dreamer, and what he is responsible to, all so rarely, is the context of his memory, the site of desire. It makes the dreaming come forward, such accountableness, as well as come back, the circumstantiality of it all:

'And that was love's high-tide mark at the beach:
A line of seaweed, broken shells, black sand.' "

"Fiercely intelligent, carefully honed, Drury's poems trust in the myth of the way things are, singing of memory and loss to our sad world of ovation and applause."  --Marilyn Nelson

John Drury is the author of Creating Poetry, The Poetry Dictionary, and a chapbook of poems, The Stray Ghost. His work has appeared in Poetry, Shenandoah, The Paris Review, The New Republic, The American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, The Hudson Review, Western Humanities Review, and a Pushcart Prize anthology.

He was born in Cambridge, Maryland, and now lives in Cincinnati with his wife, Laurie Henry, and their two children, Eric and Rebecca. He teaches at the University of Cincinnati.