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Baron Wormser is a beautiful writer of the meditative-narrative poem in the compassionate and lucid style of Frost, Weldon Kees, Carl Dennis, Hayden Carruth, and Donald Hall. Like those writers, his poems dignify rural lives, but also explore the national soul with particularly American integrity and frankness. Conversational, civilizing, thoughtful, and often funny, too, there are many extraordinary poems in these Scattered Chapters. —Tony Hoagland
Annie Dillard advises "write as if you were dying." Baron Wormser does. He writes like a man who has nothing to lose, yet is quick with a ferocious vivacity and almost always on the verge of tears or laughter. In this collection of new and selected poems, the human predicament is made present artfully; never simplified, yet distilled and nuanced. If there is an ethos that informs these poems, it has to do with truth, art, and compassion mattering terribly; that writing poems flawlessly, imaginatively, and boldly is a virtuous enterprise, done in service of what we used to call ‘fellow feeling.’ This is the real thing. There’s a haunting transparency to these poems, as well . . . as if they were made of breath. —Gray Jacobik
Following the death of his mother when he was twenty-one, Baron Wormser moved to the woods of rural Maine with “the prospect of living on earth with nothing between [him] and the earth.” For more than twenty years, he and his family lived on forty-eight acres without electricity or running water. It was during that time this small-town librarian began to write, or began “to practice balance and imbalance, trace symmetry and asymmetry, toy with words and honor them.” What followed has been a solid career as a poet without academic insularity or susceptibility to trends. By the time he completed his tenure as Poet Laureate of Maine in 2005, he had published seven award-winning collections of poetry, two texts on teaching poetry, and a memoir.
Scattered Chapters—Wormser’s much-anticipated new and selected collection—is equal parts irreverence, tenderness, and scalding political commentary. But while the selection varies in subject matter, each piece, from those first published in 1983 to his most recently written work, is solidly anchored by Wormser’s well-honed craft and remarkable ability to project himself into the lives of others. Known as the master of the persona poem, Wormser is an unapologetic narrative poet, highly skilled, and down-to-earth. Scattered Chapters is testament to a lifetime of keen observation and outstanding, sustained talent.
Baron Wormser is the author of seven books of poetry, a poetry chapbook, a collection of short stories, a memoir, and is the coauthor of two books about teaching poetry. He directs the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and teaches in the Stonecoast MFA Program. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2000 to 2005. He lives with his wife in Cabot, Vermont.
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