Peter Filkins in conversation with John Hennessy, "Water / Music"

In celebration of National Poetry Month, join us virtually to hear poets Peter Filkins and John Hennessy read and discuss their poetry! 

Event is free, but pre-registration is required. Please e-mail words@bookcellarinc.com with the subject line "Peter Filkins RSVP" to reserve your spot. Event access info will be e-mailed day of.

About Water / Music: Exploring and delineating the space between nature and culture, the poems of Water /Music anchor themselves in the timely and the timeless. Rich and diverse in their formal intricacy, they move with ease from narrative to meditation, from close physical observation to the haunts of memory, and from lyric sorrow to the pleasure of living in the world.

Poems touch on the wartime background of Monet’s Water Lilies, moonlight shining on a lake in summer, current anxieties seen through W. H. Auden’s glasses, the oracular mystery of the natural world, the final tears of St. Augustine, the glow of narcissi forced in winter, the omen of climate change in spring’s early arrival, and the “chalk-dry taste of history” in the guise of an arrowhead. Water / Music embraces and celebrates life’s mystery and the soul’s repose amid “talismans at twilight, the whir of birds.

About Peter Filkins: Peter Filkins is the author of five collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Water / Music, is just out from Johns Hopkins UP. His previous volume, The View We're Granted, received the Sheila Margaret Motton Best Book Award from the New England Poetry Club, and his poems, essays, translations, and reviews have appeared in The Paris Review, The Yale Review, The Sewanee Review, Poetry, The American Scholar, and numerous other publications. He teaches writing and literature at Bard College at Simon's Rock, and courses in translation at Bard College.

About John Hennessy: John Hennessy is the author of two poetry collections, Bridge and Tunnel and Coney Island Pilgrims, and his poems appear in The Believer, Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, The New Republic, Poetry, The Poetry Review (UK), Poetry Ireland Review, and other journals and anthologies. He is the co-translator, with Ostap Kin, of A New Orthography, selected poems by Serhiy Zhadan, longlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, 2021; Hennessy and Kin won the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation from Poetry magazine for work included in this book. A former Amy Clampitt Resident Fellow, Hennessy is the poetry editor of The Common and director of undergraduate creative writing at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.