Good Harbor by Max Heinegg

Max Heinegg’s Good Harbor is one of those rare collections of poems in which a confidence emerges almost immediately that we are in the hands of a poet who creates the sensation that life is writing itself. In a stance that manages to be at once wry and quizzical, tenderhearted and tough, the poet/speaker surveys, interrogates, analyzes, embraces, and recapitulates the torrid and balmy experience of the heart with poignancy and panache. The poems present with an intelligence that seeps ineluctably into one’s ken— Heinegg’s sagacity brews itself with a gentle muscularity and arises like steam from the cup. But the wisdom is not the totality of it—the poems also manifest a rip-roaring engagement with perception at the level of the five senses. How deeply gratifying it is to read these poems, an entire story (for really, all the poems here are episodes in the tale of a life) that does not end happily ever after, but finds its ends through the means of joy.

—Tom Daley