Love after 70? How about love, betrayal and the transcendent pursuit of yet another "Dark Lady" in literature? Washburn's sonnets, composed with amazing grace and fluency as a diary during his doomed romance, combines utterly modern language and a wry self-awareness with a classical ease. The reader is propelled into this taut narrative, nearly forgetting the formal rules and boundaries of the sonnet. The poet's engagement with Sufi mysticism adds a special grace to the denouement of loss and abandonment. We are proud to publish this new landmark in the genre of the sonnet-cycle.

The Boy from Under The Trees, first published in a limited-edition volume in 1982, is Don Washburn's lyric poetry cycle - 128 poems in 16 sections - distilling the essence of childhood and youth in a town in Eastern Pennsylvania in the 1940s. The poet recalls "As a kid, I was allowed to have the run of my neighborhood. With that freedom, came the excitement of exploration and the joy of discovery. I was left with many memories, moments that still have a special power. The poems are in an eight-line rhyming verse form called the rispetto. They sum up what I still keep from these beginnings. I...

Don Washburn, born in Easton, Pennsylvania, went on to Yale and Denver University, and a career in college teaching embracing English literature, semantics, speech, and metaphysics. During his many years in North Adams in the Berkshire Mountains, he explored Sufism, composed music, enlightened generations of curious students, and published two books of poetry, The Boy From Under the Trees and In the Eye of the Red-Tailed Hawk. His Sufi studies began in 1980 at the Sufi Order of the West at the Abode of the Message at new Lebanon, New York, where he became an initiate and a cherag, trained to...