Jim Lenfestey: Mackinac Poems

Island poet James P. Lenfestey will premier his newest poetry collection, East Bluff: Mackinac Poems Old and New. The event is free and open to all. The Island Bookstore will sell books, with a reception to follow.

The sixty-six-page collection contains forty poems written over twenty years, poems “that arrived in my laptop,” Lenfestey says, while spending summers at the East Bluff cottage. After retiring in 1998 from the StarTribune newspaper in Minneapolis, where he was a member of the editorial board, Lenfestey has spent summers on Mackinac where he say he “daily observes the dawn over Lake Huron and the life floating above and around it.” For the past fifteen years, Lenfestey has offered a summer-long course on poets and their poems at the Grand Hotel.

Lenfestey published his first book, a collection of personal essays, in 2000. Since then he has published six collections of poems, the latest, A Marriage Book: 50 Years of Poems from a Marriage, a finalist for two Midwest book awards, and endorsed by poet Gary Snyder in the New York Times. His memoir, Seeking the Cave: A Pilgrimage to Cold Mountain,was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. He has edited two poetry anthologies and co-edited a collection of essays on the life and career of the important poet Robert Bly.

About East Bluff, poet Thor Bacon writes, “… like the ever present current through the Straits, a wisdom comes only from a life well-lived, where there is ‘so much known, yet you still wake wondering.’” Island poet and retired professor Jim Bogan commented, “the odes and lyrics of East Bluff are cunningly and curiously arranged as witness to wonders simple and wonders, but for him, unseen.” Petoskey teacher, journalist and poet Glen Young wrote that the poems of East Bluff“distill the magic of Mackinac.”