Green Leaves : Selected & New Poems
by Eric Paul Shaffer
Publication Date: October 31, 2023 | LCCN: 2023941371
Paperback: $24.95 USD | ISBN 978-1-58775-042-7
E-Book: $9.99 USD | ISBN 978-1-58775-043-4
About the Book | About the Author | Events | Praise
About the Book
Green Leaves: Selected & New Poems collects work from Eric Paul Shaffer’s seven volumes and thirty-five years of publication. On voyages around the Pacific Rim, from California to Okinawa to Hawai‘i, Shaffer’s sharp eye for accurate and natural detail delights and illuminates. A charter member of the “Clear Pool School,” Shaffer writes direct, profound, and often funny poems celebrating the American vernacular and encouraging a broader sense of the human, ecological, and planetary.
Lāhaina Noon
Today, I’m a shadowless man.
The sun calls me into the street,
and I walk alone into the light of noon.
The moment has come.
I stand quietly on Front Street
balancing the sun on my head.
My shadow crawls in my ear
to hide in the small, dark world
of my skull. The sun illuminates
the shadow in my skin, and I shine
like a second moon, reflecting
all the light I cannot contain.
Lāhaina Noon is the term chosen in 1990 by the Bishop Museum Planetarium to designate the moment twice in a tropical year when the sun passes directly overhead in Hawai’i on its journey between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.
About the Author
Eric Paul Shaffer is the author of seven books of poetry. More than 600 of his poems have been published in the USA, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, England, Germany, India, Iran, Ireland, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Scotland, Singapore, and Wales. A few of his poems have been translated into Esperanto, Farsi, or Spanish. He has also published a novel, two fiction chapbooks, and a volume of criticism.
Shaffer lives on O‘ahu and retired from teaching composition, literature, and creative writing at Honolulu Community College.
Praise
Green Leaves was a finalist in the 2024 New Mexico Book Association’s Southwest Book Design and Production Award in Poetry!
“Green Leaves is fine. Think I’ll make a pot of tea with these poems.”
— Red Pine, a.k.a. Bill Porter, translator of Dancing With the Dead: The Essential Red Pine Translations, The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain, The Zen Works of Stone House & In Such Hard Times & author of Zen Baggage: A Pilgrimage to China
- A New Collection by Eric Paul Shaffer – SLANT Forum: News and Reviews, University of Central Arkansas, English Department.