Free Verse
Marsh River Editions

Catch and Release
Chasing Saturday Night
in search of "Green Dolphin Street"
Lines on Lake Winnebago
Loose Change
Mead
Saying Grace
Slightly Off Q
Something Near the Dance Floor
Waiting For Beethoven
Walnut from Waterloo

"Bill Evans playing 'Nardis' by Miles Davis"

how irrepressibly       impossibly
beautiful       so much like
the way
he plays Carisi's "Israel"
slow       so few notes
impeccably spaced       to evoke
reverence       love
for the moment       life
all
for Nardis
the notes silken
she leans over the iron balcony
the bass pulsing       giving her blood
soul and flesh
long past midnight
so much room
for the music to roam
piano chords climbing
stretching
crystal
bridges
through the nothingness of air
time slowed down
tightened to dreams

Robert Schuler's new collection shows us how the present moment is shot through with past and future moments, how a great musician like Bill Evans breaks transience open and invites us in. The poet's lines call out for recitation: "so much room / for the music to roam / piano chords climbing / stretching / crystal / bridges / through the nothingness of air / time slowed down / tightened to dreams" (from "Bill Evans playing 'Nardis' by Miles Davis"). His credo, "poetry," says it all: "paint the instants / give them weight / a heft in the hand / gold in the eye / belly all the way up to them." We have here a true inheritor of William Carlos Williams and Gary Snyder. Read Robert Schuler and weep and laugh and sing with him.

-Robert W. Greene
author of Six French Poets of Our Time
Princeton University Press

Just as the music that inspires them, the poems in in search of "Green Dolphin Street" are celebrations of the moment, whether ecstatic or meditative. Robert Schuler well knows that all we really have is moments -- and what we make of them. In this vibrant collection, he has indeed made a great deal.

-Mark Vinz
editor, with Thom Tammaro, of Inheriting the Land:
Contemporary Voices from the Midwest
University of Minnesota Press

Robert Schuler is a poet passionately searching to connect his senses with his sentences, to find words for the enchanted moments of jazz and blues, landscape and painting, love and ordinary experience, even the "cant and wobble of cobblestones." These are strong poems, hungry for words, phrases, lines, rhythms, and figures that will "paint the instants / give them weight."

-George T. Wright
author of Hearing the Measures: Shakespearean and Other Inflections
University of Wisconsin Press