A Footstep More is the third poetry collection of contemporary romantic symbolist John J. Herman. Representing his most recent work, A Footstep More strikes a tone more somber and meditative than some of his earlier verses. As always, Herman's poems are highly accomplished-complex, dreamy, and thought-provoking. With their graceful and dignified language, these are poems for people who can "feel between the lines." John J. Herman received a Doctorate in English Literature from the University of California at Berkeley, and has taught at the Sorbonne (Paris IV), and the University of Massachusetts in Boston. He then worked in Manhattan as an editor, first at Simon and Schuster, then as the Editorial Director of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and then of Ticknor & Fields, a division of Houghton Mifflin. For fifteen years he was the Associate Director of the Graduate Writing Program at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York.Besides essays, two picture books, and two previous collections of poetry, White Summer and Adam's Dream, Herman has published four novels-two with Nan Talese and two with Philomel Books. He lives with his wife in New York City and upstate New York. They have two daughters and six grandchildren.IT IS NOT PLAUSIBLEThe things that you have loved come back to you,a word you lost somehow-was it a rhyme?-an odor that returns with summertime,the two small hands you held . . . But what is time(you ask) that gives and takes so prodigally?We stand in bewilderment-for what the causethat brings once more the still-loved child, the treearching beside the window? It is not plausiblethese can return: the loosened hairstreaming in summer light-which yet is streaming still,in its unmoving Now! And yet bewarethe treachery of that which can't stand still,yet comes again, returns-like love, like pain,and takes your hand, as if it might remain.
