This new collection from award-winning poet Floyd Skloot, tracks life in all its mixed possibilities, taking hard but necessary glances at our ever-changing world. Concerned with the fluidity and fragility of memory, Skloot's new poems move between the realms of health and illness; past and present; remembering and forgetting; and the stability of change. Skloot is a versatile wordsmith who gives us lyric, narrative, and formal poems-poems in which lessons are learned from what is lost. His home, a fir and pine forest in western Oregon, provides the anchor for his work and lives at the heart of this collection. Dead artists, poets, writers, composers, actors, and even major league shortstops return to visit Skloot in the remote woods where he lives, and teach him about the sweet rewards of living in the moment. The Harvard Review called Floyd Skloot "A poet of singular skill and subtle intelligence," and radiating from the center of Approximately Paradise are poems that earn this praise by emoting universal themes like a mother's love, acceptance, wholeness-themes that succeed in reminding us of an elegant and simple paradise that is always within our reach. Book jacket.