House of Poured-Out Waters: Poems (Illinois Poetry Series) - Hardcover

Mead, Jane

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9780252026447: House of Poured-Out Waters: Poems (Illinois Poetry Series)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0252026446 ISBN 13: 9780252026447

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2001

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In "House of Poured-Out Waters", Jane Mead's substantial new collection, she continues to grapple with a world both personal and cultural. Poised in the slender moment between too early and too late, between the difficult past and the unimaginable future, Mead's poems remind us that the old debates about fate and free will, nature and nurture, are also matters of personal urgency. More than anything, it is her spiritual dimension that offers Mead a way into the future - but that way must be paved, image by image, with the world before her. Simultaneously conversational and lyrical, these fearless poems extend the possibilities of narrative verse.

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About the Author

Jane Mead is the author of two previous collections of poetry, 'House of Poured-Out Waters' and 'The Lord and the General Din of the World'. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Lannan Foundation Completion Grant.For many years Poet-in-Residence at Wake Forest University, she now manages the family ranch in northern California.

From Booklist

Mead's first collection, The Lord and the General Din of the World (1996), earned her a Whiting Writer's Award. Her second, an even more powerful work, is infused with pale light and pearly pain even as it pulses with chiming word repetitions and syncopated rhythms. Lithe and spare, Mead's poems move across the secretive white of the page like cat tracks on snow. Some are whispered prayers, lunar and full of shadows. Others express anger, sorrow, and bursts of sarcasm or metaphysical playfulness. Mead's title refers to Bethesda, the pool in Jerusalem where it is believed that Jesus healed a man who had suffered for 38 years, and water does offer solace, erasure, or escape in Mead's poetic realm. Everything there is mutable, and violence is always afoot, whether in the form of a child abuser or an earthquake, but life's push and pull, its flashes of beauty and myriad couplings, inspire the brooding poet to offer others "something / a person could live by." Donna Seaman
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