Blue for Oceans
Charles' first collection of poetry, Blue for Oceans, won the 2011 L. L. Winship/Pen New England Poetry Award for the best book of poetry by a New England author. To read a review of the book, click here. Visit the NHR Books website for ordering information or order directly from Amazon.com
"Charles Douthat writes movingly of "the days whispered through us"--what time takes and leaves. His poems take to heart the precious discoveries we are allowed. Blue for Oceans is a haunted and wise book."
- J.D. McClatchy
Charles Douthat’s Blue for Oceans shapes and reclaims emotion as a poetic virtue at a time of post-Modernist detachment and allows us to see the world--not as we ordinarily see it--but as we experience it: through the lens of memory and the human heart. The quality of Douthat’s poems lies in their restraint, their lived-in lived-through undeniable authority. He knows that the power of the unsaid-- the vast reservoir of emotion that builds up over a lifetime of experience-- puts enormous pressure on every word. Most people try to write something called "poetry." Charles Douthat is just writing it.
-L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award Citation
"These are beautiful, deft, honest, utterly adult poems. . . with an emotional force reminiscent of Snodgrass's
- Baron Wormser
Heart's Needle."