The Cat Outside His Door

The Cat Outside His Door: Poems After Roethke contains 61 new and selected poems from five decades of poet Fred Wolven’s work. Herein the author explores minute and overpowering elements of nature while examining the development of one’s psyche with vivid depictions of the wonders of our environment. Just before Theodore Roethke’s death in 1963 Wolven viewed In a Dark Time, a film of Roethke’s performance of his poems in the Puget Sound area. During the film, a cat sat outside his door, thus that cat and Roethke are subjects of many poems in this collection. In this lyrical-narrative journey through six series of poems one learns how writers impact each other and in the process how their life and writing become transformed. This volume is as close as poetry comes to providing a biographical non-autobiographical study by a current poet of an award winning 20th century master poet. In the process Wolven has created a volume of fascinating poems with a quiet connection between a cat, two poets, and their—our earth.