Way Out There: Lyrical Essays

by Michael Daley

Michael Daley's entertaining and insightful essays are gathered from his years traveling, working, writing, and finding his way in America's far west and beyond. With lyric grace and disarming honesty, he captures the optimism, experimentation and self-discovery that marked the 1970s and 80s for a generation. Traversing the shifting ground between meditation and memoir, Daley offers a unique take on our time and culture.  Whether traveling by freight-train, fishing boat, boot leather or thumb, his perspective is always fresh and inviting.  Daley's language is tuned to the music of the moment, and his poet's eye is ceaselessly alert to hidden details that bring his essays vividly to life.  

Through looking back over his own life — from early seminary days in Boston, poetic rambles "on the road" in the West, or teaching English in Hungary — he scrutinizes our culture and offers a disarming portrait of an artist coming to terms with his and our history.   

Michael Daley was born in Boston and is the author of a collection of poetry, The Straits, which Gary Snyder called “superb, elegant poetically and fresh with the Northwest world, a rich book.” He published several chapbooks between 1985 and 2004. His poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, Manoa, Margin, Alaskan Quarterly, Nebraska Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, Raven Chronicles, Seattle Review, and on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac.  

Price: $16.00 (softbound) 232 pages / ISBN 9781929355327

About Way Out There: Lyrical Essays  

"I can hardly think when a book has spoken to me as well, or in as many ways, as Mike Daley’s Way Out There: Lyrical Essays. This was not completely apparent on first reading; too old to have experienced the ’60s, I read those chapters distantly, as another well-written counterculture narrative. But Daley brings an unusual sensibility—that of a poet, teacher, and naturalist, with years of preparation (aborted at the last moment) for the Roman Catholic priesthood. He is a brilliant and quiet observer: read “The Duckabush, the Dosey, and the Hamma Hamma” for an explanation of why national parks won’t save the planet. “Climate & Currency” is as good an essay on economics as I’ve read. Daley’s range is wide, from refugees, to how he became a poet, to his time in a Budapest hospital just after 9/11. This is memoir that glints and deepens, like light and shadow on a stream. In fact a river figures in what is to me the most memorable essay, “For the One Among Us Who Will Be the First to Die.” Into this deceptively simple account of an ice-skating expedition, Daley has woven first love, the natural world, and his decision not to become a priest. It is an incomparable short story. This is a book to read more than once—maybe even more than twice."  

Bill Bridges, Author of The Landscape Deeper In: Poems, 1974-2004 

 

Michael Daley | Original Sin

 

In ORIGINAL SIN, the second volume in the new Pleasure Boat Studio Chapbook Series, Michael Daley writes of domestic life; of experiences with his son, his wife, and his mother. As he does in his more political writings, however, he brings a strong personal intensity to the work. A former tree-planter and freight-hopper, he is the author of THE STRAITS, AMIGOS, ANGELS, and YES, FIVE POEMS. Two new chapbooks slated to be published this year are: HORACE: Eleven Poems (translation, Brooding Heron); and The Corn Maiden (Tangram). He is also editor of the powerful collection, IN OUR HEARTS AND MINDS: THE NORTHWEST AND CENTRAL AMERICA, published by Empty Bowl Press of Port Townsend, Washington. Daley teaches English and philosophy at Mt. Vernon High School in Washington State.

Comments on Michael Daley and his work:

Gary Snyder on THE STRAITS (Empty Bowl, 1983): "Superb, elegant poetically and fresh with the Northwest world absorbed so beautifully. It's a rich book."

Jack Hirschman: "Michael Daley is a combiner of lyricism and political feeling evoking the clear air and poetic breath of liberation. A ground-breaking sensitivity for the future."

"Whether meditating on a train journey through Oregon farmland, observing a heron and a hawk while pulling an offshore drift log in for cord wood, or eulogizing a recalcitrant dog named Jessie, Michael Daley's poems possess the quiet authority derived from observing the world with a heart. They accommodate the border region where the realms of man and nature converge or collide: a man listening to opera while driving a pickup encounters a bald eagle in a stand of alders. Beyond that, these poems probe the deepest of human affections, as between man and wife, mother and son, father and son, brother and sister. Each poem bears our closest attention, its lovely, worthy mystery unfolding with successive readings like petals on a blossom. The poems in Original Sin are the work of a highly practiced, widely-published poet, but more importantly, their home, their territory--their geography and emotional landscape--are very much our own."

- John Willson, poet, author of The Son We Had

*The 'Daley' News: Skagit Valley Herald piece on Michael

Read Michael Daley's essay 'running on empty', a chronicle of 'Empty Bowl' press

a poem from Original Sin:

Coda

I see your smile–it's light through the window–
open, a witness to last night's poor sleep,
and look at Teddy, head turned and aglow,
blond as the wheat field he's wading in, deep
snores between us, breezes only riffling
the droop of wheat, how waves flutter a sea.
So far from fever he will be waking
soon in language informed by heat, free
to tell his dream: fire engine, and water,
and you see the fever's broken, hold him,
kiss where the virus torched and didn't scar.
All night we sponged and fanned. Was that a dream?
This body of the morning is holy,
torso where we'll burn, and where we marry.

Ordering Information

Michael Daley
ORIGINAL SIN
Pleasure Boat Studio 1999
ISBN 0-9651413-6-5
Poetry | 36 pages
Paper | U.S. $8.OO

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Pleasure Boat Studio