Joseph Featherstone lives in Gloucester, Mass., and East Lansing Michigan. He is married to the writer, Helen Featherstone; they have 3 daughters, Liza, Caitlin, and Miranda. Featherstone was an editor of the New Republic from the middle 1960's to the 1980's, when his literary criticism, his political journalism, and his writing on education made him one of the country's best-known critics. (Education Week recently listed him as one of 100 notable figures who influenced US education over the course of the last century.) He has taught at Harvard, Brown, and Michigan State. He has also spent the last two decades as an educational practitioner--first as headmaster of the Commonwealth School in Boston, and then as one of the founders and faculty leaders of an acclaimed teacher education program at Michigan State.
Brace's Cove shows that Featherstone has developed from a prose writer, journalist, and critic into a terrific poet. The poems finally collected in this "remarkably beautiful first book"* are shapely and "musical,"* with a "rare"* combination of "deep sensibility" and "strength."* For all the close focus of the individual poems, Brace's Cove expresses an entire contemporary American life over the last 20 years. It includes love poems, poems about politics, poetry about his three daughters and the life and death of his son, Jody, who was blind and had cerebral palsy, pieces about growing up Irish and Catholic in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a long stretch of boyhood in Japan, poems dealing with recent, fierce, sometimes surreal, battles with lymphoma, religious poetry, pieces that deal with the memory, grief, consolation, and joy of one life seen fully and whole, from occasions of "wry"* and high "wit"* to deepest sadness, loss, and utter "wildness."* The collection's title--an Atlantic cove to the north of Gloucester, Mass.--points to Featherstone's grounding in particulars, especially his painterly love affair with landscape, nature, and the animal world. Aptly enough, two poems are in the voice of two kindred American spirits, the painters, Arthur Dove and Fitzhugh Lane. Featherstone is that great rarity, a poet completely accessible to new readers of poetry who also gets the highest praise from veteran poets who prize craft and workmanship--a poet whose "gift of truth"* allows him to write of "harsh"* facts with "defiance,"* as well as beauty, "sweetness,"*and "grace,"* --a unique, "utterly candid music."*
"Memory echoes through Joseph Featherstone's poems like a wind, sometimes gentle, sometimes wild. He stands in it bravely and without illusion, making this wry, witty, unself-pitying, utterly candid music while time and death threaten to take it all away. For all their defiance and the frequent harshness of their circumstances, these poems manage a sweetness and grace that I find as moving as they are rare." Rosellen Brown, novelist (Half a Heart, Before and After) and poet (Cora Fry's Pillowbook)
"In...Featherstone's work one finds an unusual blend of deep sensibility with a reliable strength. Anyone who really cares for poetry will be rewarded by going straight out and acquiring this book." Josephine Jacobsen, former poetry consultant, Library of Congress, and author of In the Crevice of Time: New and Selected Poems.
"Brace's Cove is a remarkably beautiful first book of poems. These poems are unembellished, permeable, musically sweet, riddled with necessity. Featherstone is urgent and authentic and wild with clarity; he has the gift of truth." Lucie Brock-Broido, poet (The Master Letters: Poems), and director, creative writing department, Columbia University.