The Possible World by Walter Cannon

These close and emotional poems hold a child’s long yearning for the father, the words of an old song rising from memory, and the surprise of being here and there at the same time. Walter Cannon speaks with the voice of a trusted traveling companion. How strange it is to be drawn “in to the possible world.” How beautiful.

–Tim Nolan, And Then (New Rivers Press)

“We are maps for reading the heart’s country,” the speaker in Walter Cannon’s “Here and There” says to his lover, but he could just as easily be speaking for the poems in The Possible World. The literal geography of the book takes us from Cannon’s native Nebraska to contemporary Ireland, but the “heart’s country” is not so easily mapped. In these sometimes funny—always musical and beautifully crafted—poems, Cannon negotiates the paradoxes between art and life, history and memory, dark fields and the light that “must always have its way.”
–Keith Ratzlaff, Dubious Angels (Anhinga Press)