Search

Browse By Author

Author List

Share This Title

Send this product to a friend
 
 
 

MUP Catalogs

Going Farther into the Woods than the Woods Go: Poems

By author: Seaborn Jones
Product Code: P443
ISBN: 9780881462722
Product Format: Paperback
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Availability: In stock
Price: $15.00

Qty:  
Going Farther into the Woods than the Woods Go opens with the poet speaking from an interior landscape in which life is going too fast and he is lonely and isolated from himself and others. Life is brutal, and the speaker finds himself constantly questioning his self-worth, yet in a surrealistic, witty fashion perhaps best described as black humor. As the book moves forward, the point of view shifts to a landscape largely identified as a desert. Many of these poems address the horrors of war, with concerns such as political liberation, elections, and the plight of refugees. In the third section of the book, the point of view shifts to third person. In this section, the speaker confronts and challenges the reader to face reality, but the speaker poses questions that the reader cannot answer. In fact, the reader is often faced with impossible demands at times amounting to a form of blackmail. Throughout the book, the aloneness and isolation of the individual is the paramount theme; yet, despite the darkness of the poet’s vision, his fresh, vivid imagery, use of wit and humor, and his unique approach to style and content make this book a showcase for one the most interesting and original voices in contemporary American poetry.
Bookmark and Share

Reviews

Review by: Judson Mitcham, author of A Little Salvation: Poems Old and New - March 1, 2012
The poems of Seaborn Jones are wonderful and strange and often startling in their humor, but there is always a radical seriousness moving through them. This is a poet whose work displays an uncanny intelligence that never fails to delight and challenge and inform the attentive reader. His voice is unlike any other in American poetry.
Review by: David Bottoms, Poet Laureate of Georgia & distinguished chair in English Letters at Georgia State University - March 1, 2012
Seaborn Jones is an honest and caring poet trying to come to terms with a world that is not only mystifying but is often totally baffling, and at times, indeed, absolutely terrifying. How painful to feel that “We are sentenced to life without death.” These poems are palpable in their need to seek understanding and the healing moment. Jones, with great courage, faces the pain and the disheartening ironies of our everyday lives, and gives us poems that are stunning in their ability to embrace the fractured world.
Review by: Kevin Cantwell, editor, Writing on Napkins at the Sunshine Club - March 1, 2012
What we have with Seaborn Jones is the very example of the poet who distills the helplessness of life into the intricate unfoldings of surrealism. Plain but explosively imagined, Jones reminds us that Southern literature is second cousin to mid-century existentialism, which itself seeks to reorder the helplessness in which the individual finds himself mired. There’s a reason the Russians enjoy Faulkner and that the French like O’Connor, and part of that comes from their understanding that humor (if, for example, the story of Job is humorous) is violent and awful. In Jones we are kept from this horror, but there is a chill that comes over us as the chatter of human talk subsides and the cold rendering of lyric prevails.
Review: 2010 Winner - Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry - February 1, 2010
Unlike any poet writing in the South, Seaborn Jones maintains a figurative connection to surrealism, one of the essential pathways of subjectivity in American Art.

Goodreads reviews