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”
Coming Soon: Still Life with Work Boots
Title Releases on November 27, 2026
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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“Through taut language and careful observation of moments others might miss, Richard Hedderman’s 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
Praise for Richard’s Work
Richard Foerster, author of Boy on a Doorstep: New and Selected Poems
“Richard Hedderman’s poems delve into the essence of things in startling ways to reveal hidden depths. The poems are sensuous and painterly, and—if I may appropriate one of the poet’s images for tomatoes—they ‘hoard . . . in their flesh fabulous waters.’”
Karla Huston, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2017-2018, author of Grief Bone, Five Oaks Press
“The poems in Choosing a Stone are rife with all sorts of deliciousness. Such elegant writing! Most importantly, Hedderman’s language is exquisite. His word choices are attuned to sound and echo giving them a haunting quality. There is a sense in these poems of sanctuary, safety, and respite. With him, readers will ‘Walk, clothed in rags,/into [his] astonishing world.’”
Nancy Takacs, author of The Worrier, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry
“Richard Hedderman’s brilliant poetry is concise and concentric. It is a delight to read a poet who so revels in the beauty in being. I am reminded of Thoreau’s attention to the blessings and intricacies in our natural world which give our lives meaning, and his belief that a life well-lived is one that chooses only what is essential.”
B.J. Best, author of Birds of Wisconsin and But Our Princess Is in Another Castle
“Through taut language and careful observation of moments others might miss, Richard Hedderman’s 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.’”
David Southward, author of Apocrypha, Bachelor’s Buttons, and Queer Physics
“With refreshing originality, Hedderman distills the everyday into pleasing, pungent verse. His winsome persona—daydreamer, handyman, weekend philosopher—gradually reveals depths of awareness. Here lies the secret to his achievement. He writes with the austere humor and toughened hope of a man who has been paying attention to his life.”
John Galligan, author of Bad Axe County, The Nail Knot, and Red Sky, Red Dragonfly
“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 Montague, first Irish Chair of Poetry
“Amazingly learned poems!”
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.