Unidentified Sighing Objects

The focus of Baron Wormser’s poetry over more than three decades has been the human drama of our trying to shape what is misshapen. In this, his tenth collection, he takes on a dizzying range of subjects from Diane Arbus to playground basketball to the fall of the Berlin Wall to Prospero to a suicide inquest. In all his poems, he pursues the complex gist that will at once betray and reveal the welter of feeling that informs a moment, a scene, or a life.

For readers of poetry this book is the culmination of well over three decades of poetry writing, a book into which much experience of life and poetry has gone. It’s brought to light through the formal features of odes and villanelles.

Baron Wormser is the author of twenty books including novels, a memoir, a book of short stories, two coauthored books about teaching poetry, and many books of poetry (including The Poetry Life Ten Stories, 2008, Impenitent Notes, 2011, Unidentified Sighing Objects, 2015, and The History Hotel, 2023, all published by CavanKerry Press). Essays of his appeared in Best American Essays 2014 and 2018. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 2000 to 2005, he served as poet laureate of the state of Maine and received an honorary doctor of humane letters degree from the University of Maine at Augusta. He is the founder of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching. He lives in Montpelier, Vermont, with his wife Janet.

These are contemplative poems, but their occasions are the events, objects, people of our actual lives, so that Wormser’s odes and meditations serve as profound commentary on the past half century. His poems embody a kind of deep happiness that has nothing to do with contentedness. . . . Nobody’s fool, Wormser veils his metaphysics, but he keeps faith with his vision that there is, in fact, somewhere “The music you can’t hear but must be there.”
— Richard Hoffman, author of Love and Fury

This is a stunning collection. Baron Wormser is a truly inimitable poet. . . . Mysterious and suggestive, quite capable of crankily humorous philosophical locutions, he reminds us of no one else composing poetry today. Sure, Wormser might write “Life’s a beautiful meaningless gift,” and yet I think that Unidentified Sighing Objects is a gift both beautiful and profound, whose poems are in turn self-concealing and wrenchingly transparent, and every page, in equal measure, is Buddhist-of-the-moment and timeless.
— Howard Norman, author of Next Life Might Be Kinder

September 2015
108 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$16
ISBN 978-1-933880-47-1