Our World - Softcover

Stephenson, Shelby

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1941209793 ISBN 13: 9781941209790

Publisher: Press 53, 2018

Synopsis

Our World, by North Carolina Poet Laureate Shelby Stephenson, is a love letter to his wife, Nin, and to the homestead where he was born and on which he still lives. Poet Dannye Romine Powell, says, "Shelby Stephenson drags the river of love and memory in this new collection, from sassy-sweet songs to his beloved wife Nin, to the “deep and wide gladness” of being alive, to thoughts of his father’s Stetson hats and White Owl cigars, of his mother humming as she cuts cloth for a dress. . . . If poetry gets more visceral than this, quick, show me where."

About this title

Review:

Shelby Stephenson’s rhapsodic, kaleidoscopic Our World testifies both to the blessings of longevity and to the frailties of age—both to the joys of long memory and to the facts of forgetting. In these poems, past and present are equally vivid: see “The Mother’s Tale,” for instance, or “Flummoxed & Bumfuzzled.” And against the most painful of human changes, he sets the constancy of nature’s cycles, as in “Walk into Spring” and “Songbirds.” Once again, Stephenson seems about the liveliest poet living. —Robert M. West, editor of The Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons

 

Since Shelby Stephenson and I were born in the same year in the same state, I am privileged to believe that his Our World in some ways touches my world. And I can vouch for the authenticity of his vision of that world—its landscape, idiom, history, humor, cuisine, as well as its resonant music. —William Harmon, James Gordon Hanes Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Shelby Stephenson drags the river of love and memory in this new collection, from sassy-sweet songs to his beloved wife Nin, to the “deep and wide gladness” of being alive, to thoughts of his father’s Stetson hats and White Owl cigars, of his mother humming as she cuts cloth for a dress. Now he goes plunging into the burning ache of romantic love: “Those years are gone forever, Sweet, / Socked, soaked, gone for ever! / We look in glass – / Nothing comes back; / But the hands fumbling, buttery, a path, / To stifle Love’s blunt quiver.” If poetry gets more visceral than this, quick, show me where. —Dannye Romine Powell, author of Nobody Calls Me Darling Anymore

About this edition

• Publisher: Press 53
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1941209793
• ISBN 13: 9781941209790
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 102