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

Seay, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807121304 ISBN 13: 9780807121306

Publisher: LSU Press, 1997

Synopsis

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.

Poems like “Where Books Fall Open” reflect a community of souls striving toward what Whittier called “sweetness near”; Seay generously establishes the kinship between such longings, whether rooted in nostalgia or the resonance of the unnameable. The masterly “Said There Was Somebody Talking to Him Through the Air Conditioner” explores the dialectic of storytelling itself, its claim to whatever demands to be “freed from fact.” In this poem the urgency of Seay’s long, knotty lines limn with chilling precision the exact shape and dimension of the rift between the physical act and the story it tells.

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.”

Comic, sad, reflective, exuberant―Open Field, Understory glows with the worn, unselfconscious beauty of broken-in leather. This is a marvelous book by an important modern poet.

About this title

About the Author

James Seay was born in Panola County, Mississippi. His previous collections of poetry are Let Not Your Hart, Water Tables, and The Light As They Found It. A recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1988, he is professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

From the Back Cover

'Though southern to the core, Seay is also very much a part of the modern world we commonly know. He can decode its scrambled signals--from Russia to the Midi, Caribbean island to bayou fishing, Elvis to commissar. We go with him readily to place his world alongside our own and hear a voice speaking which is always honest, both complex and clear.' -- Elizabeth Spencer

Reviews

Drawing from four previous collections and interspersing some newer poems, Seay (The Light as They Found It) focuses his considerable technical skill on evoking a deliberate sense of history and place. Whether contemplating a friendship gone awry, bringing his son to the grave of his great-grandfather or coming upon a cave in the south of France, the poet's eye is held unwaveringly on his subject, sometimes looking with such dry meticulousness, however, that the poem recedes from view, sinking under the weight of his inward gaze. Yet moments of transcendence are built on details too. "The Majorette on the Self-Rising Flour Sign" depicts a gang of kids sexually fondling a billboard majorette, ending with "But what should also break our hearts is how we thought/ That this was commodity the same as flour that could be bought." Another poem brings us to the speaker's poverty-stricken Mississippi childhood and to Moscow where, as an adult, he searches for the old Faberge shop, thinking that "maybe to have pissed into the figurative/ wind and a hole in the ground/ is to be drawn to the abstract gloss/ of privilege...." At his best, Seay looks both inward and outward, as in "Where Books Fall Open," in which he considers the heft of a book in his hand and asks: "Where then will our own book fall open/ and with what sweetness of the where we have not been?" Applying his eye for detail with an ear for the unexpected, Seay finds a voice that lifts delicately off the page.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807121304
• ISBN 13: 9780807121306
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160