Books by Michael Heffernan

The Odor of Sanctity
Salmon Publishing (Ireland) 2008

“Michael Heffernan is a poet of very great, very casual power.” —Robert Wallace

The Night Breeze Off the Ocean
Eastern Washington 2005

“To write poems that combine reason and feeling so well must require a smart heart and a mind capable of love. Michael Heffernan has what it takes to lead us, line by line, to a place where emotion and thought remarkably occupy the same ground.” —Billy Collins

Another Part of the Island
Salmon Publishing (Ireland) 2000

“Michael Heffernan is one of those writers who can juggle a dozen objects of different shapes and sizes with the grace of an angel and no help from above. And all the while he will seem to be talking to you about the weather. And the weather that most concerns him is the soul's, in its poorly insulated home in the body.” —Bonnie Costello

The Back Road to Arcadia
Salmon Publishing (Ireland) 1995

“Michael Heffernan has sustained and amplified a poetry of real intelligence, technical precision, and acoustic splendour. He is a writer who has hit his stride, sure-footed in his craft enough to let imagination run and leap and dance.” —Thomas Lynch

Love's Answer
*Iowa Poetry Prize*
Iowa 1994

“Love’s Answer is the best book yet by one of the very best poets we have.” —X.J. Kennedy

“Passionate and droll, these astonishing meditations on faith, desire, and memory divide the arrow at the center of the target again and again.” —Robert Wallace

“The many conflicts the poet evokes...are parables, it seems, of his own adversarial relation to the world. So when at the book's end...the poet is able to savor the world's beauty unencumbered by misgivings, the fruit of reconciliation is sweet.” —The New York Times Book Review