At the Bureau of Divine Music

Always his imagination is flitting back to the past and jumping ahead to the future. Restlessness is a trait he shares with many of his characters, some of who appear in masterful dramatic monologues: travelers, dreamers, unfaithful lovers, embezzlers, and a man who aspires to be the neighborhood Gaughin. His travels, real or imaginary, pack his poems with references and asides that had me chasing to keep up."

~Maggie Lane

Poet Michael Heffernan is no stranger to travel. His ninth collection of poetry, At The Bureau of Divine Music, shimmies across the globe, memory and persona quicker than high-speed rail…As moving as a high, open tree swing, pendulating between the foreign and the familiar-Heffernan's latest collection is a triumphant road leading home…"

~Elizabeth Millard

Cribbing from Leo Tolstoy, poets of place are all alike in how that particular locale obsesses them, whereas poets from Detroit are uniquely autochthonous. Jim Daniels, Toi Derricotte, Robert Hayden, and Philip Levine are four writers who come to mind, and each wears their (sometimes bittersweet) affection for Detroit like a permanent tattoo. Michael Heffernan, along with the above poets, has spent more time away from his native city than within it, yet no matter where he goes-Kansas, Washington, Ireland, Arkansas-he totes Detroit's DNA along with him, whether he chooses to or not."

~Larry O. Dean

In Michael Heffernan's disarming poetry, the pagan's inchoate urgencies meet the saint's call to reflection and praise-the abject converses with the elevated, the comic qualifies the sanctified. Heffernan's voice, immediately recognizable among those of his generation, is the playfully serious sound of an enduring personality."

~Ron Slate, Author of the Great Wave

Like the Golden Gate Bridge and the Badlands of South Dakota, Michael Heffernan is a national treasure. By turns haunting, ethereal, quirky, and humorous, his poems never fail to delight."

~Martha Silano, Author of the Little Office of the Immaculate Conception and Blue Positive

At the Bureau of Divine Music is a deep meditation on the passage of time and on the central place of love and art in that process. While dealing with these very large themes, Heffernan never loses his sense of humor nor a winning sense of his own fragility and limitations."

~Keith Taylor, Author of If the World Becomes So Bright (Wayne State University Press, 2009)