Long Lens: New and Selected Poems

“Peter Makuck sees through the detritus of daily life to what matters. . . . It’s that essence that lives deep down in things, looked for in people, sea- and landscapes, and creatures, that lifts the quotidian toward the marvelous, and animates this selection of poems from four decades.”—Brendan Galvin

From "Long Lens":

Folding laundry, I can see our clothesline
waving its patches of color like the flag

of a foreign country where I had happily lived
in a small clapboard house surrounded by pines.

I can hear my mother in her strong accent
saying she didn’t want a dryer

even when we could finally afford one—
Our sheets won’t smell of trees and sunlight anymore.

Long Lens represents forty years of Peter Makuck’s work, including twenty-five new poems. With precise language, Makuck’s imagery evokes spiritual longing, love, loss, violence, and transcendence. His subjects include the aftermath of the 1970 killings at Kent State University; scuba diving on an offshore shipwreck; flying through a storm in a small plane; rescuing a boy caught in a riptide; and lucid observations of spinner sharks, a gray fox, a spider, and a pelican tangled in a fishing line.

Peter Makuck taught at East Carolina University from 1976 to 2006, where he founded Tar River Poetry. He was 2008 Lee Smith Chair in Creative Writing at North Carolina State University. Winner of the Brockman Award and the Charity Randall Citation, he lives on Bogue Banks, one of North Carolina’s barrier islands.