Casting

Casting is a moving mixture of poems that look back and poems that live in the present moment. Claps is a master of zooming in on the resonant, telling detail. In these tight, packed poems, the holy and unholy battle it out, and while he recognizes that nothing saves us entirely, he has the earned wisdom to find consolation in the small moments, the small victories that sustain us as we savor what we can while we can. - Jim Daniels, author of Rowing Inland




"Can small things of this world still comfort?" asks Robert Claps in his excellent collection of poems, Casting. Stopping to watch a flight of geese over a Wal-Mart parking lot or digging clams with his son can redeem a day. Striking poems, with wonderful storytelling, celebrate ordinary moments with exceptional power. Claps traces his growth from the innocence of a childhood with Catholic nuns who teach cursive to a discovery of teenage sex in his father's car, to a wake, to a cemetery, and to a greater awareness of loss and grief. These are poems about experiences a reader can identify with and care about. I'll certainly read them again and again. - Peter Makuck, author of Long Lens: New & Selected Poems




In Casting, a collection of wise, honed poems that often catch, in Proustian flashes, moments that last only seconds, but seem eternal, Robert Claps bears witness with attentiveness, patience, and care to the fears, joys, and discoveries of his childhood and to the myriad ways in which those experiences have informed his adult life. This book is an important contribution to the field of narrative-lyric poetry. It builds on the work of the genre's exemplars such as Philip Levine, Len Roberts, and Roland Flint and establishes Robert Claps as a poet to be celebrated and cherished. - Daniel Donaghy, author of Somerset