Bill Kemmett is a poet’s poet. Approaching his 90th birthday, the muse refuses to let him off the poetic hook. She is constantly with, and within him, during his daily sojourns to the St. Lucie River, tending to his majestic garden and meditations on the miracles of nature and family. In The Last Whiskey Dance, he brings his dynamic vision, style and wisdom to each page. His poems will take readers deep into his Boston roots, provoke outbursts of laughter, reveal new insights and sightings into the natural world and stimulate the screen-numb senses. But to fully appreciate this terrific collection of poems, readers should take the time to enjoy a favorite libation, and toast this poet, for poems that enrich the spirit and unleash the joy and freedom of language. 
   Richard Martin 
Author of Formula for Electromagnetic Candy/Selected Poems

On William Kemmett

In Blackbird, William Kemmett is a poet of global imagination, who takes you along on his morning walks from Port St. Lucie to Bombay, Tokyo and back by the way of the rainforest … His conversational poems are witty, informative and delightful.
   P. J. Laska, ed., author of The Sleep of Reason

In Blackbird, William Kemmett is the Baudelaire of Port St. Lucie, the Hafiz of clouds, the Kabir of ocean waves, and the Rumi of dust. He is the master of kinetic stillness.
   Rustin Larson, author of The Philosopher Savant

In Black Oil, William Kemmett recognizes how at odds our modern culture has become from the natural that would sustain it, and his poetry seeks to engage that world and note, in its most minute details, what is essential.
   W.E. Butts, Author of Sunday Evening at the Stardust Café
Former New Hampshire Poet Laureate

Bill Kemment’s Flesh of the New Moon echoes voices of nature, be it mineral, vegetable, animal, or human kingdom. Kemmett’s precise, to the quick poems, are more than oriental, for he is, in the deepest sense, a New Englander Boston born and Roxbury raised. His images evoke a strength that is confirmed by his understatement.
   Peter Kidd, founder of Igneus Press
Author of The Human Condition

Look inside Hole in the Heart and you’ll see a small rural house with a single lamp-lit window behind which an extraordinary poet in his prime is up late into the night crafting and polishing acerbic verbal jewels of wisdom – half Eastern parable, half good old American commons sense – whose slow-motion, implosive meditations go off in the reader’s mind like depth charges of awareness. Or let me put it this way: Kemmett writes the kind of poetry that makes you want to write.
   Jack Myers, Author of Routine Heaven: Poems