Description: The Last Neanderthal is the fifth collection by the Lamont Award winner Michael Van Walleghen. Many of these poems find their occasions in the remembered past although they resonate, in their metaphorical implications, far beyond the parameters of personal history. The "last Neanderthal" of the title poem, for instance, is at once a fanciful and humorous projection of the speaker's own felt circumstance and a figure for the shared extinction that awaits us all. In free verse distinguished by uncommon precision and formal elegance, these poems explore the labyrinth of memory as it exists in both the personal realm and in the larger, human history we share in common.

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