Lanter, Wayne

Wayne Lanter has been a faculty member of Belleville College, Illinois, since 1972. He is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s Program in Creative Writing. He is the founder and editor of River King Poetry Supplement and has been a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient. His poem "The Waiting Room at Children’s Hospital" was a winner in the Triton College Salute to the Arts poetry awards. He has been anthologized in 90 Poets of the Nineties.

At Float on the Ohta-Gawa

1997 0-7734-2838-0
Narrative poem of a Japanese-born American physicist-poet who returns to Hiroshima, and the emotional and intellectual devastation the journey carries with it. Consists of a prologue and seven parts (one for each of the seven rivers that flow out of the Ohta upon which Hiroshima is set) and an epilogue, centered on the symbolism of the destruction of Hiroshima.

Canonical Hours

1999 0-7734-3087-3
The strong imagery and immediacy of the language of everyday life of these poems become prayers and curses. These are poems used to better empathize and understand the perceptions and psyches of coal miners, farm wives, blacksmiths, of the disinherited and displaced, whose lives have been damaged by accident and war, by hatred and human folly.

Waiting Room

1995 0-7734-2747-3
This poetry is rigorous and honest, accessible and penetrating. Lanter explores the links between man's frail existence with the larger universe, and his place in it. These poems show the influence of Larkin, Brodsky and Walcott.