Dancing with Columbus gathers together fifty-two beautifully crafted new poems by award-winning Minnesota poet, translator, and editor Robert Hedin. Employing spare, imagistic language, Hedin explores the themes of loss and reclamation, the integrity of everyday events, and our proper place in the natural world, with its seasonal turnings and yearly migrations. In one poem, an elderly man, newly retired, gains a new perspective on life watching primates at the zoo. In the title poem, a retired boxer teaches some youngsters to dance at an abandoned boatyard. Visions of sunrise across a field at dawn, a day at the races, golden pollen in the air--these and many other quotidian events are given depth and brought into sharper focus by the poet's discerning lense.
Born and raised in Red Wing, Minnesota, Robert Hedin is the author, translator, and editor of more than two dozen books of poetry and prose. The recipient of many honors and awards for his work, including three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships as well as fellowships from the Bush, McKnight, and Yaddo Foundations, he has taught at the University of Alaska, the University of Minnesota, St. Olaf College, and Wake Forest University. He is co-founder and former director of the Anderson Center at Tower View, a residential artist retreat in Red Wing. His work has been featured on The Writer's Almanac, National Public Radio's All Things Considered, and in the nationally syndicated column, American Life in Poetry. He lives in Frontenac, Minnesota.
"Robert Hedin's new volume of poetry is one of his finest, a book that celebrates the humble and the ordinary, mice and barn swallows and Green Stamps. Hedin is a master of understated elegance, of getting the right word in the right place, putting one's ego aside and letting the craft do its work. These poems are little armadas of language that take us to distant places and back again to the plain beauty of the Midwest." — Joyce Sutphen, Former Minnesota poet laureate and author of Paper Camera and Naming the Stars
"Robert Hedin remains one of my favorite American poets. I admire his poems' clarity, brevity, wisdom, and humor, how they go about 'giving importance / to whatever was common.' His ability to view the present and the past in the same lightning glance distinguishes his work, as does his ability to glimpse and lament our future extinctions in these elegiac and memorable poems." — Michael Waters, author of Pagan Sky: New & Selected Poems 2000-2025
"With signature grace and clarity, Dancing with Columbus awakens us to self-induced erosions and ruins while rendering afresh the resilience of beauty—the fields of mustard whose dried tips 'burn like stars,' tumblers lining the kitchen window, 'potatoes / Stuck in their mouths, their water gone green, / Wild with pale, spindly roots,' leaves 'sagging / Under the bright freight' of monarch wings.I will always return to Robert Hedin's poetry with anchored trust in its integrity and ability to restore soulness." — Mihaela Moscaliuc, author of Heartmoor
