Reaching for Longer Water ― New and Selected Poems

Award winning poetry critic Ange Mlinko wrote of Parsons and his work, “The Renaissance man was once a courtly ideal; Parsons shows that it is a democratic ideal too—warm-blooded, muscular, as companionable on the page as in the flesh.” Both tangible and cerebral, Parsons’s poetry lifts its readers into a new, transformational reality with a depth of insight that is truly exceptional.

Reaching For Longer Water brings the reader, the most compelling of his poems from his previous four collections, poems hailed by poetry luminaries, Edward Hirsch, Stanley Plumly, Robert Phillips, and Paul Mariani.

THE FRANK GAZE OF WOMEN
After Baudelaire’s “Exotic Scent”
Yes, yes, they bestow delights—
not only in the seedy way
we all know: they plant something
in the littoral vacancy
and in an instant there is an ineffable
fire—that forging force
on which so much more depends
than wheelbarrows & chickens.

DAVID M. PARSONS, 2011 Texas Poet Laureate, grew up in Austin. After serving in the U.S.M.C. Reserve, he worked as a haberdasher, advertising agent, and teacher/coach at Bellaire High. For the past 25 years, he has taught Creative Writing, Handball, and Racquetball at Lone Star College. He lives with his wife, Nancy, award-winning artist, in Conroe, Texas.