travelling-light240

Travelling Light (poetry)

Thunder’s Mouth Press
New York, NY
1987
99 pages, paperback
Design by Loretta Li
Author photo by Russell Jeffcoat

Winner of the Capricorn Book Award of The Writer’s Voice 1985, selected by Galway Kinnell.
Sponsored by The Writer’s Voice of the West Side YWCA in New York City, the Capricorn Book Award is given annually to the winner of an open competition among American poets who are over 40 years old.

Travelling Light was also a finalist for the Lamont Award.

Available through Alibris and AbeBooks

Reviews Comments Where to Buy
Thomas McGrath

“One of the best books I’ve read in some time with a range from the Objectivist to the Surrealist.”

James Welch

“Ken McCullough celebrates the far corners of America with an unerring compass. Travelling Light is an invitation to a journey we all should be honored to take. We are in the company of a wonderful poet.”

Charles Johnson

“Ken McCullough is a globally talented writer, his artistic gifts ranging over fiction and film, but it is in these gentle and graceful poems, as perfectly crafted as logical proofs, that he reveals the hard-won spiritual depth of his art– a depth and diversity of form and feeling readers of every taste will find deeply satisfying.”

Ralph Beer

“There is a heady vitality, an eagerness for life, a joyful embracing of experience in Ken McCullough’s poems reminiscent of Kerouac’s first books. The poems in Travelling Light have an ethereal quality, like pipes heard or imagined in summer woods, which draws the reader seductively through moments of youthful discovery to later elegiac tributes to people and places discovered with love. McCullough takes time to care for the unadorned, for Amish farmers and junked-out Indian camps, for abandoned homes in ruins and the people who filled them with life, for finding peace in homely places and the agonies of Americans gone wrong with war. These poems reawaken the joys and sufferings of a generation that America has worked hard to forget.”

William Hjortsberg

“I read the first half of Travelling Light on a jet plane bound for California. The second in the shade of a cottonwood grove on the Crow Nation in southern Montana. Both times it felt the same: a first-class journey.  Ken McCullough’s poetry is at home in either place. At once modern, clean; efficiently getting the job done, and timeless, rich with unspoken mysteries and the eternal magic of natural wonders carefully observed.”

Peter Klappert

“…McCullough is a poet of the rich and varied American experience– earthy and gritty, unconventional, rooted in the land and the labor required to build from that land, well-read but distinctly nonacademic, idealistic, visionary, sometimes disillusioned and angry, but nonetheless affirmative, celebratory, a weaver of sensual and spiritual fabric– blood, lymph, air, gut, nerve: synapse– that binds us together…. His sympathies are clearly with the engaged writers, the counter-culture writers, the visionaries, the innovative teachers and the frontiersmen of current American letters….”

Painting by Lisa Nankivil for "Obsidian Point" Book Cover

Photos of painting, books and other works by Kathy Greden

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