Out of the Gate

<p>Drawing on poems composed between 1960 and 1970 Out of the Gate makes available for the first time a sampling of previously unpublished work by Ken Lauter the author of fourteen previous books of poetry and a prose/poetry memoir of his experiences as an environmental activist The Ratlue Diaries: Two Poets and the Rocking K War in Tucson Arizona (SFA Press 2017).</p><p>These early poems were originally assembled in three manuscripts: In Praise (which received a Hopwood Award for Poetry at the University of Michigan) Metronome and New Light. Lauter now seventy-four looks back on these poems written in his late teens and early twenties with a combination of bemusement and awe seeing them as raw and remote as though written not by him but by a ghost-poet he can now barely recognize. (The ghost in fact makes a surprise appearance at the end of the book.)</p><p>This collection includes love poems to his wife (a neuroscientist photographer and poet Judith Lauter); an elegy for his father; anti-Vietnam War protests; meditations on the Apollo mission to the moon as well as on the music of Mozart and Beethoven; and several longer narratives on a variety of themes.</p>