Open Field, Understory: New and Selected Poems (Southern Messenger Poets) - Hardcover

Seay, James

4.2

5 ratings by Goodreads

9780807121290: Open Field, Understory: New and Selected Poems (Southern Messenger Poets)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807121290 ISBN 13: 9780807121290

Publisher: LSU Press, 1997

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This superb collection of new and older work shows James Seay's sure progress from the reflection of first influences to the strongly individual voice of his later pieces. As always, Seay evokes a profound sense of history and place - the landscape, colors, scents, and musical vocal cadences of his native South and the world at large. Yet, though the compulsion to "tell stories, when the truth won't work" may be our downfall, Seay shows us that stories are also prisms refracting each seemingly simple moment into infinite complexity. The stories in these beautifully wrought poems offer us swift glimpses of grace - when the fragmentary individual memory flares, is transformed, and becomes the story we have all been waiting for, the one that "frees the body from the fact of itself."

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About the Author:

James Seay 's other books of poetry are Let Not Your Hart, Water Tables, and The Light As They Found It. A native of Mississippi, he is a Bowman and Gordon Gray Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Review:

Another Sentimental Journey
Audubon Drive, Memphis
The Ballet Of Happiness
The Barber With The California Tan
The Big Money Comes To My Hometown
Bridges
Cheese
Circling The Reef
Cisternal Anecdote
Clouds Over Islands
Cottonmouth, Angus, Redwing
Deep In Dordogne
Easter Sunrise, The Constant Moon We Settled For
Faith As An Arm Of Culture, Culture As An Arm Of Narration
Family Business
The Final Reasoning Of Kings
The Fire Of Both The Old Year And The New
Flags
Flat-out, In 5/4 Time (in Memory Of Paul Desmond)
For Joshua, At His Great-grandfather's Grave
Gift List
Gifts Divided
Grabbling In Yokna Bottom
The Green World
Hunger
An Ideal Of Itself
In Residence
Inside, Outside The Dialectics Once More
It All Comes Together Outside The Restroom In Hogansville
July 4th, 1960
Kelly Dug A Hole
Languages We Are Not Born To
Little Ones, Scattered
The Majorette On The Self-rising Flour Sign
Marigot, F.w.i.
The Motion Of Bodies
Mountains By Moonlight
Naming The Moon
Natural Growth
The New Rheostat
Night Fires
No Doric Air
No Fluid-fed Governor
No Man's Good Bull
Not Something In A Magazine
Nothing He Had Ever Thought Or Done
On The Island
On The Steps To Roquebrune
On The Way
One Last Cheer For Punk Kincaid
One Of The Big Differences
Options
Patching Up The Past With Water
The Pomegranate
The Puritan
A Question Of The Elements
The Reaching Back With Both Hands
Said There Was Somebody Talking To Him Through The Airco
Think Back
Tidal Rivers
Tiffany & Co.
Time Open-faced Yet Secret Before Us
The Tree Man At The Parthenon Tourist Home
Turtles From The Sea
We Are Stardust
The Weather Wizard's Cloud Book
What Lasts
What Words For
When Once Friends
Where Books Fall Open
Where Cerritos Is
Where Our Voices Broke Off
Won't You Be Mine, Columbine
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder�

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