Home and Away by Alan Basting

I have been listening for years to Alan Basting’s calm, wry, affectionate voice telling faithfully the shapes and textures of life as he sees and lives it. The plain, direct language of the poems that voice delivers reminds us what it is like to be awake minute by minute in the world of our being. More importantly, and profoundly, their humor and unaffected humility suggest that we may have available to us a steadier, more capacious happiness than we know.

–Christopher Howell

In Alan Basting‘s Home and Away, the voice is simultaneously traveler, bystander, and intruder, a recalcitrant participant-witness admonishing himself for riding the cusp of someone else’s accidents. Basting’s Home and Away reads as a single piece, a team of quietly building poems beginning with could be and maybe, inviting a layered view of the peopled and natural worlds as one, where the here and there of good fortune or dumb luck turn on a series of undeserved near-misses for which the long-lived might be grateful.

–Bim Angst