Kindling: Poems From Two Poets

by Eric Paul Shaffer

Book by Shaffer, Eric Paul; James Taylor III

70 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1988

About the author

Eric Paul Shaffer is author of nine volumes of poetry. Most recent are Free Speech, published April 1, 2025, and Green Leaves: Selected & New Poems, published on Hallowe'en in 2023. Even Further West was published in 2018 by Unsolicited Press, and A Million-Dollar Bill was published by Grayson Books in 2016 and re-published by Coyote Arts in January 2024. Other volumes include Lāhaina Noon: Nā Mele O Maui; Living at the Monastery, Working in the Kitchen; Portable Planet; RattleSnake Rider; and Kindling: Poems from Two Poets (with James Taylor III).

Shaffer's next book of poetry Second Nature is a single poetry volume of fifty-seven poems previously published individually in reviews of the past decades. The book will be published in 2026.

Nearly seven hundred individual poems appear in venues throughout the world, including Slate, North American Review, The Sun Magazine, RATTLE, Ploughshares, and Threepenny Review; Ireland's Poetry Ireland Review and Southword Journal; Australia’s Cordite Poetry Review, Going Down Swinging, Island, and Quadrant Magazine,; Canada’s Antigonish Review, Dalhousie Review, Event, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, and PRISM International; New Zealand’s Takahé and Poetry NZ; England’s The Stand Magazine, and Magma; and in the anthologies 100 Poets Against the War (Salt 2003); The EcoPoetry Anthology (Trinity UP 2013); and Jack London Is Dead: Contemporary Euro-American Poetry of Hawai‘i (And Some Stories) (Tinfish 2013).

His first novel Burn & Learn, or Memoirs of the Cenozoic Era was published by Leaping Dog Press in 2009, and two chapbooks of fiction selected from the novel have also been published: The Felony Stick and You Are Here.

Shaffer has completed and will soon circulate for publication a second novel Six Ways Home, the story of fifteen-year-old Ray who works at a Michigan Christmas tree farm and lives with his mother, brother, and sister, who have been recently abandoned by the father.

In 2002, Shaffer won the Elliot Cades Award for Literature, an endowed literary prize awarded annually to an established local writer in Hawai‘i. In 2006, he received a fellowship to the Fishtrap Summer Writers Workshop and Retreat; won the Rupert Hughes Writing Award for an excerpt of his novel-in-progress Six Ways Home; and received the "Award of Excellence" in the Ka Palapala Po‘okela Book Awards for Lāhaina Noon from the Hawai‘i Book Publishers Association. In 2019, Even Further West also received "Honorable Mention" in the Ka Palapala Po‘okela Book Awards.

Shaffer’s poem "Officer, I Saw the Whole Thing," from Lāhaina Noon, received a "Special Mention" in the 2007 Pushcart Prize Anthology XXXI. In 2009, for his poem "The Whistle," he won the 2009 James M. Vaughan Award for Poetry from Hawai‘i Pacific University; the poem is included in A Million-Dollar Bill. In 2010, his poem "A Boat of Bones" received first place in the Lorin Tar Gill Writing Competition sponsored by the National League of American PEN Women; this poem is included in Even Further West and in Green Leaves: Selected & New Poems.

Long ago, he was a co-editor of Conceptions Southwest and a book reviewer and poetry co-editor for Stick: Contemporary Poetry and Timeless Cuisine. More recently, he has reviewed for Fish Drum, Mad Blood, Maui Time Weekly, Chiron Review, and The Pedestal Magazine. He was also a contributing editor for The 365 Project.

Shaffer was raised, educated, and annealed in Maryland, Michigan, Indiana, New Mexico, California, and all parts Pacific, including Okinawa, Maui, and Oʻahu.