Description
Again, Charles Douthat
$25.00
ISBN: 979-8-9906141-8-5
Fine Softcover; 100 pages; 6″x9″
Publication Date: April 29, 2025
Summary
In Again, Charles Douthat charts a profound journey through love, loss, and the complicated grace of survival. Moving from childhood’s luminous moments to the raw territories of grief, these elegies for his parents and sister transform personal sorrow into a larger meditation on how family shapes and haunts us: “They were gone for good. They light my way.” With remarkable tenderness, Douthat explores the ways we carry those we’ve lost, finding in memory not just pain but also unexpected mercy. From California beach towns to New England woodlands, these poems remind us that even our deepest wounds can open into moments of startling beauty and revelation.
Author
Charles Douthat is a poet, retired litigator, and visual artist. Born and educated in California, he practiced law for many years in New Haven and began writing poems during a long mid-life illness. His first collection, Blue for Oceans, received the PEN New England Award, as the best book of poetry published that year by a New England writer. J. D. McClatchy called it “a wise and haunted book.” Charles lives in Weston, Connecticut, with his wife, the artist Julie Leff.
Praise for Again
In an elegantly unadorned and lyrical plain style, Douthat recreates the lost and troubled members of his childhood family so vividly that we feel not so much the presence of the past as the heart-wrenching pastness of the past, in all its unresolved and unresolvable complexity. This is a book impossible not to love.
Alan Shapiro, author of Night of the Republic
In these poems, you’ll find yourself in rooms so vivid you can touch their brass door-keys and feel the light on your own face.
Tyler Mills, author of Hawk Parable and The Bomb Cloud
Douthat writes of living and dying, poem by poem, recalling the troubled (sometimes addicted) lives of a family, reaching in his final section a profound opening-out both of style and vista where—in memory and poetry’s paradox—there is ‘so much life afterwards.’
David Baker, author of Swift, New and Selected Poems
Each poem in this book is a sustaining spark, despite the grief and loss they overcome. . .This is a book of clarity, wrought from long life and its restraints.
Maurice Manning, author of The Common Man
In Again, Douthat gives us poems that are morally and spiritually essential, that convey the very breath of life.
Gray Jacobik, author of The Banquet, New and Selected Poems
This is the book of poetry one prays for, rarely gets.
Nancy Fitz-Hugh Meneely, author of Letter from Italy, 1944
