David Kherdian’s LIVING IN QUIET: NEW & SELECTED POEMS is an intriguing collection with images from his childhood, early days of marriage, reflections about his parents and Armenian customs, his nine years in a spiritual farming community, and more. Each section reveals something about who David is as a person and as a poet. The poems for his wife, Nonny Hogrogian, artist (the cover is one of her woodcuts), sparkle with self-discovery. “Getting Married” made me smile with its innocence and joy and anticipation of the future. The words for his parents, particularly those for his father, contain tortured memories of not understanding how unbearably difficult it was for them to begin a new life in America, living through bombings by the Turks, forced from their homeland during the Armenian Genocide. His years on the farm bring him a peace that I feel he had not known before that, a peace and an awareness of life’s blessings… “O if I could only be to bird and animal / red tractor or green / And come with them at will / across this vibrant, mysterious land / Rejoicing in the food / revealed by each turning tread / And they secure in the halo of my love / this is all I would of holiness be…” My favorite, though, are his growing-up poems. David recalls happenings with intimate detail, remembering what those experiences were like, but adding his now adult perspective: “He was the first person I had ever / known to die. We were maybe / eight years old, and we hadn’t the / feelings to go with the event.” He talks of “The rag and tin man / on his horse-driven cart / and the excited fireman’s / clang clang clang” and of the river and mulberry trees, the grocery store lady, birthday parties, fishing and friends. Two of his best are the poems “Dear Mrs. McKinney of the Sixth Grade” and “The Art of Kindergarten” where a first report card “had come on rose colored crepe paper.” Who could not love a description such as “...written carefully in a feminine— / and this was important—practiced hand, / delineating all the things I had done in / that class: put on galoshes alone, good / at going down the slide, can shovel sand / into a pail…”

David Kherdian notes that “We are known by what we remember, / what we noticed. / Each poet must find his own objects / in the sun.” I know this poet better by what he has remembered and, as one of his lines says, that makes me “just happy as grass.”

To order the book and learn more about this extraordinary writer, visit http://www.davidkherdian.com. ( )