Café Millennium & other poems
by H. R. Stoneback
ISBN 0-916620-84-0
144 pages $20

H. R. Stoneback is a poet, literary critic, folksinger-songwriter and professor of English at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He is a Hemingway and Faulkner scholar who has lectured at Peking University, University of Paris, and has acted as Director of the American Center for Students and Artists in Paris.

Stoneback's poetry has been published in the United States, France, and China. He is the author of Cartographers Of the Deus Loci, For We Have Had Song in These Places, Hemingway's Paris: Our Paris?, Singing the Springs, and other books. He lives in the Hudson Valley, Kentucky, and France.

"On 'Woodsmoke in Aigues-Mortes: Late November' (winner of the W.B. Yeats Prize and one of the poems included in Café Millennium) performs an act of verbal hypnosis on its reader. The repetitions of smoke 'whether rising from an outdoor fire, a kitchen, or a pipe' create a pattern within the poem's five octaves that draws us inside the landscape of the poem and its speaker's discrete sensibility. Smoke actually seems to drift through the lines of the poem.

The French place-names form another pattern, their vowels and consonants adding an under-music to the poem's already tuneful language. The poem begins in sensuous pleasure and then veers off to consider one war safely locked in the historical past and another war threatening to erupt into the present. How the poem manages to return after touching on these disturbing realities to the pleasure of seeing (or not seeing) cows at night and inhaling the perfume of woodsmoke in the French countryside only attests to the steady hand and equipoise of this poet." - Billy Collins, Yeats Newsletter.