Adam's Dream

ADAM'S DREAM is John Herman's second book-length collection of poems. In 2021 his first collection, WHITE SUMMER, was released. He has previously published four novels, including THE WEIGHT OF LOVE, a 1995 Nan Talese Book that was selected by PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY as one of the best novels of the year. He has been a professor, editor, and novelist, but has never ceased his devotion to poetry, which he began writing as an adolescent. Herman writes that his roots as a poet lie in the Modern tradition, and behind that in the Romantic and Symbolist writers of the 19th century, with their belief that poetry represents a unique form of discourse. Language-its words, images, metaphors-offer meanings and implications, Mr. Herman suggests, that lie embodied in the poetry itself, making of poetry a continuing, cumulative experience. Individual poems can be seen as fragments salvaged from the great unfinished epic of the human imagination. In one of his letters Keats wrote that "The Imagination can be compared to Adam's dream-he woke and found it truth." ADAM'S DREAM can, then, be seen as a collection of such "salvaged fragments" which, like the Imagination in Keats' parable, prove, upon waking, to be portions of that ongoing Epic which is Truth, with or without a capital "T".