"Dowsing for Joy"
from Floyd Skloot's
The End of Dreams

Floyd Skloot:

Floyd Skloot has published four previous books of poems, including Approximately Paradise, winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Book Award, and The Fiddlers Trance; three novels; and an essay collection. His two memoirs are In the Shadow of Memory, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the Independent Publishers Book Award, and its sequel, A World of Light, named an Editor's Choice by the New York Times Book Review. He lives in Amity, Oregon. For more information, visit www.floydskloot.com
(Photo by Beverly Hallberg)

About The End of Dreams:

"These poems are luminous, tough, wise and daring, intensely moving. Floyd Skloot is a master of the high-wire act that is poetry."
— John Stone

"In his exquisite fifth book of poetry, Skloot writes of an upside-down world. Here, a child knows an act of love means, 'losing is winning as a frown / is a smile and a curse is a kiss.' Skloot takes us through air raid drills; the sudden absence of a father, the end of his own 'fathering time,' the lives of his grapdparents and brother, and the alterations of consciousness that signal illness, death, and vision. Then empathically, in the personae of Whitman, Cezanne, J. S. Bach, and other artists, he takes us back in time and brings them forward – to say that we thrive as others fail, and must. In his beautiful and wise new book, readers find solace in Skloot's promise of 'the past made whole' by his passionate acts of art and memory: the 'miracle of the mind's endless life.'"
— Hilda Raz

"It is a rare contemporary poet who can evoke the tragic emotions – fear, sadness, and pity – who dares to encounter the pain of the human condition without blinking, and without the defenses of formulaic irony. The best of Skloot's poems (and in The End of Dreams his best are to be found) are courageous, and achingly beautiful."
— Daniel Mark Epstein

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