Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P551
ISBN: 9780881466300
Price: $17.00
Catharine Savage Brosman’s singular and authoritative voice, familiar to poetry readers in the South since the late 1960s, is heard again as she brings to scenes and topics, both new and familiar, her broad range of craftsmanship and styles, using, as one critic wrote, “metaphors brilliantly fitted in detail to the moods and workings of the human heart and mind.” Her poetic practice shows how closely the art of verse can, and must, be connected to human experience, the very feel of which comes through in the poems here. The book features travel poems from four continents, rhymed lyrics on small or expansive topics, narratives in blank verse (concerning El Cid, Swift, Dickens, Charles Dodgson, Saint-Exupéry, and two women writers), five translations from Baudelaire (among the least-known poems), and satires concerning painting and publishing. Recurring themes include “great age” and death, friendship, piano playing, flowers and gardens, and the desert.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P428
ISBN: 9780881462418
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $20.00
Abandoned Quarry publishes for the first time in a trade edition Lane’s poems from Quarries, As the World Around us Sleeps, Against Information & Other Poems, The Dead Father Poems, Noble Trees, and other chapbooks, broadsides, and little magazines. Mostly out of print, or simply unavailable except in rare book collections, the selection of poems in Abandoned Quarry shows the growth and fullness of spirit of one of the important Southern poets to emerge in the 1980s.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P651
ISBN: 9780881468571
Price: $17.00
ACCORDING TO SAND is an aching, wryly joyous collection that embodies the erosive and porous qualities of sand and invites us to recognize how we might remain among the remains, settling, shifting, filtering, and surviving.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P650
ISBN: 9780881468564
Price: $17.00
The poems in AGAINST THE WOODS' DARK TRUNKS stare deep into the shadows of Jack Bedell's native South Louisiana swamp to find ghosts, monsters, death, and flood waters.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P549
ISBN: 9780881466256
Price: $17.00
In the story of the earth, geologists tell us that around 12,000 years ago the planet shifted from the Pleistocene to the Holocene. There probably were poets to sing about that change, but of what they sang, we have no records. Even earlier, paintings on cave walls point toward an artistic response from our upstart species. These early artists painted the Pleistocene’s last great ice age herds thundering past. Now John Lane’s traveling geologist sings a dawning epoch’s blues. The Anthropocene is upon us, and his poems show how humans believe they have become “the planet’s boss, the big chief, the emperor of air, diesel fuel,/bow thrusters, and tax shelters…”
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P639
ISBN: 9780881468311
Price: $19.00
With its broad range of vision and mastery of poetic technique, ARM IN ARM shows again why Catharine Savage Brosman is, as Claude Wilkinson wrote, one of America's finest poets. Her wit, powers of observation, and depth of feeling are displayed on page after page, as she looks at the world personally, phenomenologically (in food and flower poems, for instance), and spiritually.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P682
ISBN: 9780881469103
Price: $20.00
The poems in Bill King's first full-length collection articulate a life grounded in the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains. We see memories of his youth in southwestern Virginia's Back Creek Valley, as well as poems of adult years in (and exploring the Monongahela Forest that surrounds) the mountain town of Elkins, West Virginia. These poems follow the root of a life nourished by and inseparable from garden soil, mountain rivers, and the hearths and kitchen table of home back to its origins. King's poems offer a language for how to love a world we must, ultimately, leave.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P664
ISBN: 9780881468762
Price: $20.00
Marissa Glover once again addresses herself, with her signature wit and moxie, to matters political and personal, sacred and profane, in a voice at once disarmingly colloquial and slyly erudite. Varying tonal registers with an easy grace, she ranges freely over national affairs of great historical importance and tiny, shrewdly observed incidents from domestic life.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P391
ISBN: 9780881461633
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $18.00
Breakwater, Catharine Savage Brosman’s new collection, presents a wide variety of lyrics, narrative poems, and meditations in free verse, blank verse, rhymed quatrains, and other forms. Whether she is describing the flight of egrets, a bougainvillea vine, a family running from the Nazis, the beauties of Unaweep Canyon in southwestern Colorado, or adventures of the heart, Brosman’s technique allows her to convey the very essence of her topic by those incantations and “immaterial conceits” (as the poem Éventail puts it) that are the mark of exceptional poetry.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P528
ISBN: 9780881465716
Price: $17.00
Each poem in this award-winning collection represents the life of a carnival performer or that of an outsider whose life is rife with carnival metaphor. For instance, “The Two-Headed Woman and the Two-Faced Man” is both literal and metaphorical. Naturally, she draws carnival audiences, and as an outsider and illusionist of sorts, he complicates her life.
Through deft, incisive portraits, Lesley Dauer populates these pages with people and animals in whom we recognize our own strengths, quirks, and bewilderment. We meet among others: a human cannonball preoccupied with thoughts of his family’s welfare, a contortionist controlled by his emotions, and compassionate dancing bears concerned by the psychological limits of their audience.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P617
ISBN: 9780881467772
Price: $16.00
In his thirteenth collection of poetry, Jack B. Bedell examines moments of reparation and continuance in the face of loss. By turns personal, ecological, cultural, and fantastic, these poems promise new maps to navigate damaged territories. The rituals of family and South Louisiana culture share space with folklore and history here.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P480
ISBN: 9780881464702
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $18.00
In 1976, Joseph Bathanti left his home in Pittsburgh for a fourteen- month sojourn as a VISTA Volunteer with the North Carolina Department of Correction.
His new volume of poems, CONCERTINA, recounts in lyrical sweep his entry into the surreal, brutal, and often terrifyingly beautiful netherworld of convicts and their keepers. It is a world with one foot still firmly planted in the old chain gang, the other venturing beyond the manacles of history into a realm of second chances, while the country, in the throes of its bicentennial celebration, still swoons from Watergate and its aftermath.
What’s more, CONCERTINA, is an outsider’s meditation on the American South and the power of place to transform not only language, but to instill in the speaker the impulse to tell the story of everything his eye lights upon. Indeed, Bathanti’s world is as much about the geography, the very ether, of North Carolina, as it is about prisons. His voice is contemplative, poised on a tightrope of its own making, pitched near detonation.
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