Adam's Dream

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>ADAM'S DREAM is John Herman's second book-length collection of poems. In 2021 his first collection WHITE SUMMER was released. He has previously published four novels including THE WEIGHT OF LOVE a 1995 Nan Talese Book that was selected by PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY as one of the best novels of the year. He has been a professor editor and novelist but has never ceased his devotion to poetry which he began writing as an adolescent.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)> </span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)> Herman writes that his roots as a poet lie in the Modern tradition and behind that in the Romantic and Symbolist writers of the 19th century with their belief that poetry represents a unique form of discourse. Language-its words images metaphors-offer meanings and implications Mr. Herman suggests that lie embodied in the poetry itself making of poetry a continuing cumulative experience.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)> </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(35 31 32 1)>Individual poems can be seen as fragments salvaged from the great unfinished epic of the human imagination. In one of his letters Keats wrote that The Imagination can be compared to Adam's dream������-he woke and found it truth. ADAM'S DREAM can then be seen as a collection of such salvaged fragments which like the Imagination in Keats' parable prove upon waking to be portions of that ongoing Epic which is Truth with or without a capital T.</span></p>