Bruce Ducker was raised in New York City and spent most of his working life practicing corporate law. He has been writing novels since 1975. His eighth novel, Dizzying Heights (shortlisted for the James Thurber Award), was published in the spring of 2008, and his ninth book, Home Pool, a collection of short stories, that fall. He has won the Colorado Book Award (for Lead Us Not into Penn Station), was shortlisted for the American Library Best Book Prize, his novel Marital Assets has been nominated for a Pulitzer and his poetry for a Pushcart. His poems and stories appear in leading periodicals including The New Republic, the PEN/America Journal, the Yale, Southern, Hudson, Literary and Sewanee Reviews, and Poetry Magazine. A jazz pianist, he lives in Denver and the Aspen Valley.
A new book of Ducker's poetry, titled STEMMING THE FLOW, Kingston University (U.K.) Press, is now available and has already garnered significant pre-publication reviews:
“A single spoiler—lurking deep in these varied and always vital poems is this: ‘I’ve gone from partner to partner,/ Looking for fidelity.’ The gentle irony, the unjudgmental but arresting awareness of the poet is key to these major if sometimes tiny Ovidian tales and talismans, these poems about the unceasing changingness of consciousness. Exactly my story and everyone’s.”
--Bin Ramke, author of Earth on Earth, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition and the Iowa Poetry Prize.
“Bruce Ducker is a mellow musician. He brings us great new arrangements on familiar themes of love and yearning--especially yearning--but also funny or piercing takes on the quirks of life that we would otherwise have missed. To read him is to love him.”
--Ruth R. Wisse, Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, Harvard University
“Edward Lear meets Phillip Larkin in these poems by turn whimsical and shot through with the ‘glass pianos’ of an intelligent, provocative nostalgia—for one’s past, for music, for family, for place. There is no subject too quotidian—a traffic jam, a simple peach—or too ineffable (the theory of relativity, the vicissitudes of love, the ‘abiding flow’ of time) for Ducker’s perspicacious attention. Stemming the Flow is an irresistible debut from an established author of fiction, and Ducker’s training in prose keeps these lyrics well-paced, with spot-on timing. The poems in Stemming the Flow are alight with Chekhovian clarity and a poetic wit all their own.“
--Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems and Paradise Close: A Novel , Professor of English at the University of Virginia.
“Stemming the Flow is unusual for both its range and its craft. Ducker is a close observer of himself, as a poet must be, but also of what exists outside of himself, as a novelist must be. Across a range of witty light verse, passionate love poems, meditations on aging, books, music, the natural world and more, he is therefore far better than most poets at evoking the dramatic dimensions of our lives.
“Unlike most novelists who turn to verse, Ducker knows his versecraft cold and gives us well-turned lines in both meter and free verse throughout. American poetry needs more work like this, which is so measured and meaningful that it brings everything it touches, even death, into harmonious relationship, thereby transforming mere experience into an intense, focused linguistic encounter with the world. This is the kind of writing that deserves the name “poetry.”
--David J. Rothman, author of six books of poetry and Unlocking the Secrets of English Verse, a poetry textbook; Poet-In-Residence, Colorado Public Radio.
“From deeply poignant poems about the loss of a spouse to a brilliant retelling of the fall of Ikaros, from playful poems about scarecrows and Smith-Coronas to a sonnet on Bach, Bruce Ducker brings a wealth of erudition, formal skill, and sparkling wit to a remarkable range of subjects. Readers disenchanted with the aridities of postmodernism will find much to remind them of the essential pleasures of poetry in Stemming the Flow.“
—John Brehm, author of No Day at the Beach and Dharma Talk; winner of the Brittingham Prize
“I like your poems….I’m amazed by your rhyming. So few people these days attempt formal poems. ‘Dappled’ is my favorite [and] ‘Willy Loman’ is fun.”
-- Donald Hall, U. S. Poet Laureate, 2006-2008; Winner, National Medal of Honor.
