Then heaven became a place
to lie down in for an hour,
with the long summer sun on our faces,
amid the drone of bees in a tended garden,
and above us the vitreous savannas of cloud.
from “Discovery of Heaven”
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Title Releases on November 27, 2026
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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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A Poem for Ukraine
I’d been working on this poem for some time and getting nowhere with it. When the Russia/Ukraine war broke out, I learned that the sunflower is the national flower of Ukraine, and finally the poem found its purpose.
OCTOBER SUNFLOWER
Rooks have plucked your sun-struck eye,
mining seeds to nourish the dead.
The bone-white sun of August has singed
your florets. Head piked, the down-turned
mouth of the outcast twisted with defeat,
and bearing now the blackened mask
of summer's rout, slumping crownless
on autumn's mute gallows. Blind worshipper
from the land of the one-eyed,
amid the slag of spent leaves you turn
your back on us, to the brooding furrows
and the dead weight of the sky, waiting
for the earth to reclaim its wreckage.
Heliotrope, when the corona mounts its zenith,
the solar pulse will once again toughen your spine
and, like the broken heart of this word,
you will be driven once more into flower.