Still Life with Work Boots by Richard Hedderman

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The poems in Richard Hedderman’s Still Life with Work Boots are dispatches from the numinous juncture of cognition and mythos, and from these haunted landscapes he hauls up scenes from the turbulent cycles of our current identity: a sardonic rumination on a common three-letter word swerves menacingly into an unnerving interrogation of the speaker’s loyalties, fragments of mangled speech evoke the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, and a great horned owl preaches a bleak exhortation to its quavering acolytes under threatening skies blackened with rain. Yet Hedderman is quick to laud the minutiae from which we distill our survival: a solitary umbrella in a Kyoto tea house, the pearl buttons on a silk blouse, a white rose afloat in a glass of water. All leave their indelible imprint on the human terrain where we relentlessly struggle to confirm our own endurance. As the poet intones in “Repairing the Wind Chimes” If I could quiet them, yoke/these burnished columns of air. If I could/scuttle my wreckage and tie the winds together.

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Richard Hedderman is a poet, writer, essayist, and educator, and the author of three poetry collections. His writing is featured in numerous national and international publications and several anthologies including In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare (University of Iowa Press). He’s performed his writing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, served as a Guest Poet at the Library of Congress, and is formerly senior educator and Writer-in-Residence at the Milwaukee Public Museum. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, his most recent book of poems is Choosing a Stone (Finish Line Press). He lives in Milwaukee, where he teaches creative writing at Mount Mary University. https://richardheddermanpoetry.com

PRAISE:

There is a line in Richard Hedderman’s newest book of poetry that nails, for me, this extraordinary poet’s method, his purpose, and his power: I always refused the blindfold but took the cigarette. Thanks to this courageous habit, plus the surprises and pleasures of the artist’s rigorous and defiant daydreaming, Hedderman’s Still Life with Work Boots is flush with poems that startle, please, resonate, and remain.

–John Galligan, author of Bad Axe County, The Nail Knot, and Red Sky, Red Dragonfly

With refreshing originality, Hedderman distills the everyday into pleasing, pungent verse. His winsome persona—daydreamer, handyman, weekend philosopher—gradually reveals depths of awareness. He sees himself as a Catholic schoolboy, chastened by a nun for bad penmanship, “scourged in the terrible wind of my failure.” When his favorite boots are accidentally given away to charity, the sulking husband recalls “the wounds I made/standing in my own darkness.” Here lies the secret to Hedderman’s achievement. He writes with the austere humor and toughened hope of a man who has been paying attention to his life.

–David Southward, author of Apocrypha, Bachelor’s Buttons, and Queer Physics

Richard Hedderman has surveyed our modern apparatuses, replete with cruel nuns and the orchestrators of war, and he is not impressed. “We get the gas stations/we deserve,” he writes. But he also reminds us there is a freshness in simplicity, where grilling salmon can be a holy act and wood screws shine like “tiny brass gods.” Through taut language and careful observation of moments others might miss, Still Life with Work Boots urges us to do the good work—staining a picnic table or admiring the way car headlights pierce the night—so that we, like an October garden, might be “driven once more into flower.”

–B.J. Best, author of Birds of Wisconsin and But Our Princess Is in Another Castle

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