Swimming From Under My Father

Swimming From Under My Father by Michael O'Keefe

As an actor, Michael O'Keefe has garnered both Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations. He's appeared in the films Michael Clayton, Frozen River, The Pledge, Ironweed, The Great Santini and Caddyshack. Television audiences will remember him as "Fred" on Roseanne. Other TV appearances also include The West Wing, Law and Order, House M.D., The Closer and Brothers and Sisters. He's appeared on Broadway in Reckless, Side Man, The Fifth of July and Mass Appeal, for which he received a Theater World Award.

What others are saying about Swimming from Under My Father:

Thomas Carlyle wrote, "Mirth resting on earnestness and sadness, as the rainbow on black tempest: only a right valiant heart is capable of that." Michael O'Keefe's Swimming From Under My Father gives us narrative poems that bring humor and loss into wondrous relation. There's an ease of voice here, and a reverent irreverence that evokes the Beat Poets' vibrant, jivey spiritual energy. ("Burn your maps Baby. The path: ashes.") Alcoholism, deceit, love, forgiveness, regret, death; Noah's Ark in the California desert, goofball Zen koans and an octogenarian Romanian rabbi hitchhiking: it's all here, handled with a hard won sense of the absurd. Never ponderous, the poems are buoyed by clarity and candor. This book contains some of the best poems about losing a parent I have read, poems from "a right valiant heart."
—Amy Gerstler

The poems in Michael O'Keefe's collection, "Swimming From Under My Father"are a testimony to the double edge of trying to navigate a way out while also attempting reconciliation. While his music is borne out of the observed life-—the larger project is of whatever one can make out of the dance between souls, kin or otherwise. Ultimately, and despite some harrowing relationships, it is O'Keefe's own voice that carries the day'— his response to Pound's "Poetry is news that stays news" is "You are the news!"
—Sophie Cabot Black

These are compellingly accomplished, earned poems that reveal a world both precisely felt and observed, the product of a distinctly disciplined perspective and a wealth of experience. Michael O'Keefe's poetry is a genuine gift for which I remain deeply grateful.
—Sam Hamill

Michael O'Keefe's poems are agreeably cosmopolitan and witty, and his voice is authentic/contemporary. I'm particularly impressed by a sequence of father poems which is both unusual in its compositional strategies and very moving.
—Ed Ochester