The Night the Moon Went Sailing

Dan Close is a poet and novelist writing in the hills of northwestern Vermont. Among his works is a volume of poetry entitled What the Abenaki Say about Dogs and the novels Song of Quebec and The Glory of the Kings, winner of the 2014 Maria Thomas Best in Fiction prize from Peace Corps Writers. Another of his works, Tales from the Arusi Hills, is held in the Special Collection of Peace Corps Writing at the Library of Congress. His poetry appears in several anthologies. He is currently a member of the Poetry Society of Vermont. You can learn more about Close at his website, danclose.net

Review Quotes:

“Dan Close walks through a landscape that is at once narrative and lyrical, wild and right-at-home. These works are deeply rooted in New England’s natural and literary landscape, using rhyme for whimsy and repetition as sacred invocation. He muses on Robert Frost as a “canny old man turned brittle with farms” and gives voice and agency to rivers that bring peace, bees who warn us to survive, and beavers who hold the world together. Dan Close lives where the night is alive, where “the streaking cold-limbed comets of the skies, Unheard, are sizzled in the fry of winter’s wood.” Given the choice of a warm spring day or a whipsawing storm, he chooses to stand, and write, in that transcendent place where wind drives biting rain and salt spray rimes his face and words.” —Cindy Ellen Hill, author of Wild Earth and Other Sonnets and Elegy for the Trees

“Each poem in The Night the Moon Went Sailing is a Close encounter of the best kind!” —Jerry Johnson, Poet of the Kingdom, author of Up the Creek without a Paddle and Noah’s Song

“From speculation on ‘the nature of things’ to memories of ‘the laughter of my father's folk,’ Dan Close takes us on a poetic journey that crosses centuries and cultures, touching on the wonder of creation. As poems must, these find their own voice, some speaking of ‘the best of critters’—a squirrel who dies as ‘may we all, with such sweet beauty’; dogs who wait for us ‘when we pass over to the next abode’; small warblers ‘that flit among the undergrowth.’ Others center on human experience, reminding us of our connection to the natural world; we are taken to a Medieval garden where we can ‘breathe the air of Frankincense and myrrh,’ to the banks of the Saco whose waters ‘roar along its ancient bed,’ to Robert Frost's farmhouse, where the poet waits with patience ‘for that poem to come to light.’ In this collection Close seeks to bring us to a place where ‘time is unbroken,’ where we can see ‘spacedust,’ full of ‘the sun and bright, scarce-moving air.’” —Carol Milkuhn, Vice President of The Poetry Society of Vermont and author of Modern Tapestries, Medieval Looms

“Dan Close’s poems are a delight—brimming with generous spirit as they salute angels and beavers, rivers and women in supermarkets, kisses and ‘Charlie Chaplin’s walk.’ He is a poet of ‘celestial objects’ yet he is a poet of the earth as in his beautifully clear-eyed Elegy for a Spring Squirrel. In our hurried, harried days we overlook, brush aside, and move on, but poems dwell and dig in. Dan Close is a dweller and a digger.” —Baron Wormser, Poet, Novelist, Teacher, Poet Laureate of Maine, 2000-2006