Books
Blue For Oceans
Winner of the 2011 PEN New England Award as the best book of poetry published that year by a New England poet.
NHR BOOKS - 2011 - ISBN: 978-0-98299008-1-9
From the publisher: “Set within an American family in the second half of the twentieth century, the poems move from California to New England, from boyhood to ailing parents, from a long marriage to love’s dissolutions, from childbirth to children leaving home. Understated, perceptive, grounded in the occasions of ordinary life, these remarkable poems by a writer looking back from midlife feel like long-promised gifts, long-waited for.”
Praise for Blue for Oceans
“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.”
— Kurt Brown, PEN New England Award Citation
“These are beautiful, deft, honest, utterly adult poems. . . with an emotional force reminiscent of Snodgrass's Heart's Needle.”
— Baron Wormser