Second Wind

David Graham's poems are wonderfully subtle. They present a quiet, polite, plain spoken appearance to casual acquaintances; but friends with an ear to hear will soon sense that—beneath the calm surface—there stirs a much darker current, urgent and powerful, one engaged by an imagination that is ripe, wild, funny, and true. These poems embody that doubleness perfectly, the feeling that our world is at once reassuringly familiar and surpassingly strange. To self, to small town, to the dust-haunted reaches of memory and universe, Second Wind gives compassionate attention; and as David Graham, that keeper of "local faith," rightly says, "any act of attention / turns to love." —Michael McFeeDuring the first half of my life, I spent all of my summers in a small Pennsylvania town; and ever since then, it seems to me, I've been looking for a poet to give such a town a voice. It already exists in prose: Granville Hicks's marvelous portrait of Grafton, New York, Small Town. But no one I know of had caught in poetry the brutal, aimless, raw, public/private world of back-alley and choir-loft and school-yard violence; of swimming holes and attic trunks and neighbors' locked garages all aching to be touched and tested and tasted; of a place where almost everybody knows the secret vices and unexpected virtues of almost everybody else. Well, David Graham, whose work for the past half-dozen years has been a bright spot in the literary periodicals, at last with accurate speech gives us the American small town and its citizens not as they ought to be but as they are. —John Unterecker, Michigan Quarterly ReviewIn dense, richly textured language, David Graham draws on the ancient art of scop and minstrel, juggler, storyteller, and magician, to sing sagas of small towns, boyhood, domestic life, aging. Tough-minded and lyrical, and full of canny intelligence, all his taut tales ring true. —Ronald Wallace.