Hands of the Saddlemaker
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Nicholas Samaras; Foreword by James Dickey
"Nicholas Samaras's poems are unique in their orientation and display a linguistic sense that should earn him a wide and discriminating audience. The most engaging quality of his work is his metaphysical internationalism, the note of the eternal exile who yet finds remarkable and life-enhancing particularities in the countries through which he passes."—James Dickey
"Nicholas Samaras's first book is remarkable, chosen by James Dickey for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, which has a long history of publishing the first books of poets who have had distinguished careers—among them James Wright, Robert Hass and Carolyn Forche. Mr. Samaras deserves to be in good company. He is a stern and original poet, whose seriousness and morality seems almost foreign. . . . This is a poetry of beauty and purity, often painterly. Mr. Samaras can sweep from one country to the next, from ancient history to now in America, and yet create a methodical, weighted sense of time and place."—Liz Rosenberg, New York Times Book Review
"Selected by James Dickey as this year's winner of the Yale Younger Poets competition, Samaras' book might have deserved the prize merely for his stunning `In the Shell of a City Cathedral,' one of the most magnificent longer poems of recent years. . . . Powerful visionary states are difficult, nigh impossible, to capture in time-centered languages like ours, but Samaras comes close."—Pat Monaghan, Booklist
"These meditative, searching poems, often strikingly set in the shelter of churches or in the Greek countryside, are full of images of displacement and allusions to the religion and culture of forefathers."—Library Journal
"Samaras's voice seems at once fresh and aged, speaking across cultures, traditions, and oceans. . . . Meditative, deliberate work which honors the past an yet carries us forward into our own self-creation."—Bruce Murphy, Poetry
"Samaras has genuine talent."—Choice
Winner of the 1992 Colorado Book Award Contest, Poetry Division