Michael Heffernan’s The Breaking of the Day is a book built around a three-piece title sequence that ventures through stages of life in one’s own backyard, which may extend to the verge of a wilderness ending nowhere or a garden framed by clumps of blue-green hills rolling softly toward the sea.
As much as he can make them, Heffernan’s poems are inventions of a reality ...
Michael Heffernan’s The Breaking of the Day is a book built around a three-piece title sequence that ventures through stages of life in one’s own backyard, which may extend to the verge of a wilderness ending nowhere or a garden framed by clumps of blue-green hills rolling softly toward the sea.
As much as he can make them, Heffernan’s poems are inventions of a reality in words caught in passing between strangers who stop and listen without needing to know why. Many are poems of places, from almost anywhere in Ireland to northern Michigan near the verge of the farther shores of the uppermost Great Lakes, and, when nowhere else brings heart’s-ease and rare joy, a tumbledown backstreet gleaming white against a blue Paris sky. Throughout are voices speaking plain American, talking for talk’s sake or for the good of any order that good talk can warm to.
Michael Heffernan was born and brought up in Detroit, Michigan, in the teeming Irish-German-Mexican-Polish-Appalachian-African-American melting pot of the city’s southwest side near the Detroit River. Since 1986 he has lived in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas.
The Breaking of the Day is Michael Heffernan’s tenth book and his fourth from Salmon. His previous titles include The Cry of Oliver Hardy (University of Georgia, 1979; reprint 2007), The Man at Home (University of Arkansas, 1988), Love’s Answer (Iowa Poetry Prize, 1994), The Night Breeze Off the Ocean (Eastern Washington, 2005), The Odor of Sanctity (Salmon, 2008), At the Bureau of Divine Music (Wayne State University Press, 2011). He has taught poetry at the University of Arkansas since 1986. He and his wife, Ann, live in Fayetteville. They have three sons, a daughter, and a grandson.
