Conversations Overheard in a Restaurant: Poems. This item is unavailable.Conversations Overheard in a Restaurant: Poems

Conversations Overheard in a Restaurant is a collection of poetry. At times playful, at times moody...at times funny and at times atmospheric, Conversations Overheard in a Restaurant--Robert Alan Clanton's first published collection of poems--invites the reader to observe both the universal and the unfamiliar through this poet's specialized lens. Though approachable and direct, these poems are never ordinary, and surprises often lurk around the corner. From his deeply personal memories of childhood and teenage years, to bittersweet stories of love found and love lost, to his reverent and sometimes spiritual observations of earth and nature, Clanton's poems tease the reader into turning each page in search of the next cinematic vignette. Often tactile and sensory, Clanton's imagery beckons us into each place and time: the shrouding snow and bitter chill of Medicine Wheel Passage, Wyoming; the palpable tension between friends in Still Life in Afternoon Light; the playful eroticism and olfactory enticement of Recipe for Pasta Primavera; the harmonious, mystical forces of natural beauty found in Chapel of the Transfiguration; and the idyllic thread of a fourth generation Floridian's love of unspoiled places in Resurrection Fern. Conversations Overheard in a Restaurant is a collection of snapshots, stories and little movies--bound together in the enticing form of the carefully crafted narrative poem, and there are flavors and textures here to please the palate of anyone who savors contemporary poetry.

Alan Clanton is a native of Jacksonville, Florida and a graduate of Florida State University. A lifelong student of poetry, his first formal collection as an English major was titled Godzilla Versus Opie Taylor, for which he won the Cody Allen Harris undergraduate poetry prize at Florida State University. His poems have appeared in Kudzu Review and Snake Nation Review. The poems which appear in Conversations Overheard in a Restaurant are taken from two previous collections: The Geometry of the Clouds (completed in 1999) and Transparent Moon (2006). He was the editor of the student newspaper Thursday Review in Jacksonville, and in 2007 and 2008 wrote the weekly newsletter Roadshow: The Presidential Campaign in Review.