Virginia Walkabout
Bill Glose
POETRY
Bill Glose is a former paratrooper and combat platoon leader. After serving in the Army, he worked in paper factories in Chicago and Massachusetts before returning to Virginia. Wanting to reconnect with his home state, he walked 1,500 miles through every region of Virginia and wrote about his experiences in essays for magazines and poems for literary journals.
Glose was named the Daily Press Poet Laureate in 2011 and featured by NPR on The Writer’s Almanac in 2017. His poetry appears in three published collections (The Human Touch, Half a Man, and Personal Geography) and numerous journals, including The Missouri Review, Rattle, Narrative Magazine, and The Sun.
"In his remarkable new collection Virginia Walkabout, Bill Glose takes us on a lively tour of his home state, chronicling it from an astonishing variety of vantage points. He roots these engaging and clear-voiced poems in the precise, tender observation of ordinary lives, and in the particulars of landscape—this remains so even when the subject turns historical or autobiographical; so that while, individually, they read like charming miniatures, they enlarge, collectively, into a broad and striking mosaic. It's a lovely work, generous in its range, in its attention to detail, and in its spirit."
—Derek Kannemeyer, author of An Alphabestiary
"Before you open Bill's book grab your walking stick. You are going on a journey of centuries as much as miles. His poems sing of Virginia and her memories, some are treasures of past and pride, some are reluctant resurrections of embarrassments. All instruct with the clarity of spring water and leave you mellow in mind like a fine wine."
—Ken Sutton, author of Manhattan to Machipongo
"Bill Glose has a special strength in giving readers unexpected gifts such as breathtaking scenery written with reverence and celebration. He gives us the joy of feeling small in a big world. Many of Bill's poems sing with adventure. Then there are those that whisper and allow the reader to linger in their beauty. We follow the author on a Virginia Walkabout, happy to be wherever he leads us."
— Ann Falcone Shalaski, author of World Made of Glass and Without Pretense