Chris's work burns the pages with the hottest lines and the spiciest words to fill any reader's appetite. This book goes to the far depths of everything from eclipses to the homecomings of the sea. From poem to poem, I feel as though I am traveling on vacation_hopping from one island to the next_some describing the awesomeness of pregnancy to the reality of growing up. Hatteras Symphony will make you chuckle, make you wonder, and give you a true appreciation for the little things that make living beautiful. _Suzanne Strickland, Editor of Melting Trees Review

Hatteras Symphony brims with an ethereal, almost outre quality that only a Chris Waters can express. He ingests his own energetic spin on language that, too often in contemporary literature, has become languid and predictable. The Chrisness of his poems cannot be overlooked any more than it can be imitated. _Mike Catalano, Founder, Melting Trees Review

What an unafraid voice, and what a deft one, moving effortlessly from meditations on mortality to dissertations on the mating rituals of the blue crab, from the timeless power of hurricanes to the equally timeless shelf life of Wonder Bread (calcium propionate added to retard spoilage). Chris Waters is both philosopher and comic, detailing the natural world of his coastal Eden with a careful hand while painting the vanities of human beings with a broader brush. These are poems of place, of landscapes internal and external, captured in language that transforms the commonplace into the magical, like the grain of sand that, lodged in an oyster, "becomes a wondrous jewel in that host's diadem." _Kathryn Kulpa, Associate Fiction Editor of Pif (www.pifmagazine.com)

Each poem in this gathering, brief or long, is a symphony, and amidst the detailed notes and clear-toned perceptions there is the Breath Pause of wit and tenderness which orchestrate a work here, both balanced and wise. _Tom O'Grady, Editor, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review

Chris Waters
Chris Waters, born in Wilmington, splits his time between Cape Hatteras and Rhode Island. His first visit to the Outer Banks was in 1957, camping in the dunes at Cape Point, when that was legal. His poetry and prose_widely published in North America, Europe, Africa, and Australia_include: Senegal, Poems on Africa; Th‚ƒtre Noir; and Paul Claudel. He has just finished King Philip's Talking Head and Other Amerindian Poems, still in manuscript.

Pelican

The ocean scuds over the lone pelican's webs.
Its beak hangs down as if something's there. Yesterday,
before the mishap, it had helped herd the wild minnows
into their death trap. Afterward, it had flapped
to the cloud and plummeted to the water. From
a fathom deep, three quiet croakers floated up.
Its osprey cousin arrows too from a height
but strikes the prey directly into motionlessness_
or more_like its name, aquiline bonebreaker.
Between claws and talons, it carries the animal home.

At the dune's top, wrapped in sea oats, a young couple
scans awhile, then descends to the beach. The pelican
moves far to the side. It looks down, not offshore, where
the raucous gulls wheel over the hopeless bluefish.
It can not see, then, those gulls in twos who
separate from the double turbulence and head off_
like the mute swans, eternally bound, who,
when the lakes and rivers have hardened,
come down to salt water for provender.

From nothing, out to sea, a point appears. A kayaker,
clearing high his oar over the small waves,
thrusting one blade, or the other, into the resistance,
pushing backward handily. The man and the woman
see him. He does not see them. None of the three,
or the gulls, or the bluefish, see the pelican, who,
if it looked up, would not see that the kayaker,
with a single oar with its two blades, is most
like it, except for the wounded wing, until the end.

28 PAGES/$9
1-882983-67-X