The Night Breeze Off the Ocean

Michael Heffernan uses his powerful affinity for strong, taut language to offer us a dose of Irish sensibility and a dash of sorrow and joy. This latest collection will excite his followers and convert the rest of us. Through an artful mastery of language and image, The Night Breeze Off the Ocean delves deep into the layers of human consciousness and blurs the line between living and dying, reality and imagination, tragedy and bliss.

Michael Heffernan

Michael Heffernan's previous books include To the Wreakers of Havoc (Georgia, 1984), The Man at Home (Arkansas, 1988), Love's Answer (Iowa Poetry Prize, 1994), and Another Part of the Island (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 1999). He has won two Pushcart Prizes and three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. He was born and grew up in Detroit, where he was educated by the Jesuits before pursuing his graduate degrees in literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has three sons, Joseph, James, and Michael Eamon, along with a stepdaughter, Natalie Luer. He lives with his wife, Ann, in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he has taught creative writing at the University of Arkansas since 1986.

Reviews

Michael Heffernan is a wonder, his new poems crooning from self to soul and back again. What do you call such virtuosity? A congress of iambs! He can sing to me any day. . . .

—Alan Michael Parker, author of Long Song with Motor Vehicles and Days Like Prose

To write poems that combine reason and feeling so well must require a smart heart and a mind capable of love. Michael Heffernan has what it takes to lead us, line by line, to a place where emotion and thought remarkably occupy the same ground.

—Billy Collins, author of Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems and former U.S. Poet Laureate

Heffernan's poems will outlive us all. The imaginative range, emotional register and technical virtuosity of this work is permanent—masteries more startling for the cloak of ease he wraps them in: a mighty work in words.

—Thomas Lynch, author of Skating with Heather Grace and Bodies in Motion and at Rest

The language of this poetry is civilized and deeply accomplished. Heffernan does not try to dazzle you with intellectual footwork, but like Wallace Stevens, guides you firmly through the gothic, contemporary, ghostly, antique corners of his mind; through monarchies, executive suites, Jerusalem, parking lots, France, Sumer, medieval Ireland, and ever onward to another place.

—Paul Zimmer, author of Trains in the Distance and Ingulf the Mad

Ordering Information

To purchase The Night Breeze Off the Ocean by Michael Heffernan, please contact our distributor, University Press of New England toll free at 1-800-421-1561 or by fax at 1-603-448-9729. The book is also available online at UPNE, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other fine retailers.

To request a copy for review, please contact the Carnegie Mellon University Press Editorial Offices at (412) 268-2861 or by email at CarnegieMellonUniversityPress@gmail.com.