The Lord And The General Din Of The World: Poems - Hardcover

Mead, Jane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0964115107 ISBN 13: 9780964115101

Publisher: Sarabande Books, 1996

Synopsis

Jane Mead was educated at Vassar College, Syracuse University, and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and has taught at several schools in the San Francisco Bay area, at Colby College, and in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, In 1991, State Street Press published her long poem "A Truck Marked Flammable" as a chapbook. Her individual poems have been widely published in such places as The New York Times, Best American Poetry of 1990, American Poetry Review, The Virginia Quarterly, Ploughshares, and The Antioch Review. In 1992, she received a Whiting Writers' Award.

"Mead's poems lay bare a pathology that evidences the world and the self as illness and cure, where language bears the hellish and the holy fruit of its culture. Mead unsettles me. And I'm grateful."-American Book Review

"Waiting for redemption from on high is a futile hope, and from that sudden understanding comes the animating imagination that carries these poems along. They read with an ease exceptional in poetry today, and at times with a playfulness akin to some of Roethke's last books."-Rain Taxi

"Jane Mead-Poet. Author of what may be the best book of poems for 1996-The Lord and the General Din of the World."-The Bloomsbury Review

"The Lord and the General Din of the World, spoken in an intensely open voice . . . suggests that the only stable existential presence can be created in the language of art. But at every turn the relationship between language and identity is questioned."-The Journal

"[These poems] may change your view of what has meaning in the madness of American culture. Such poetry could easily become tediously clinical or unbearably despairing, as so many poems on the subject are. In fact, Mead never lets the reader off easy the unearned hope or resolutions. She does reveal, however, possibilities for redemption."-Small Press Review

"These are not poems to be read silently, in a comfortable corner or chair. . . . [Mead's] poems enriched my appreciation of words and image and life in general."-Hodge Podge Poetry

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Poem by Jane Mead:

To the Body

I don't know how to speak to you. I have tried and tried, but I don't know how to answer.

I gave you tide pools for your feet, salt on wind for your lips and the sound of waves for your ears:

Nothing.

I made you stare through the arch of a window where Simon left his body hanging: Nothing, not a tremor.

I tried the junkie's twilight sleep, but you would not come with me. I climbed the stairs in a house by the sea.

Climbed past the porthole on the landing, the tailless lizard in the corner, and let the stranger's hands massage you.

I forgot myself and let her have you. These things I did for you because of what I know: there is no easy truce of words forthcoming.

And you pushed the clear tears out- they dripped down the bench to the carpet they kept on coming-as if I'd understand.

As if I'd understand or could go with you.

Review

"It is rare to find poetry so determined to cast aside the notion of comfort through faith, yet so successful at conveying the fragility and fortitude of the human soul. . . . Mixing prayer and trouble, high art and fractured lives, these poems teeter brilliantly, frighteningly, away from the pastoral and toward the abyss." -- Boston Review

"Mead's thematic concerns . . . are ambitious, and her language more than lives up to the project. Indeed, Mead-s language is so freshly constructed, so nervy, that she is able to transform topics that may seem merely sensational in the hands of a lesser poet-for example, drug addiction-into art. . . . Jane Mead proves herself to be an exceedingly lucent and thought-provoking lyric poet." -- The Gettysburg Review

"The feel of Mead's writing is relatively simple and open, both in its textures and in its emotional vulnerability. And her writing is full of surprise, twists on 'reality', moments when what we might call the face of things enters the text, grimaces or winks." -- Poetry Flash

About this edition

• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0964115107
• ISBN 13: 9780964115101
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 96