Search

Browse By Author

Author List

Share This Title

Send this product to a friend
 
 
 

MUP Catalogs

The Evangelist: Poems

By author: David Armand
Product Code: P649
ISBN: 9780881468557
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Availability: In stock
Price: $18.00

Qty:  
Acclaimed novelist and memoirist David Armand's first full-length collection of poetry, THE EVANGELIST, contains poems that are at once deceptively simple, clear, and colloquial, yet dense with meaning and universal significance. Drawing upon everyday incidents, Armand fashions poems of great lyrical beauty and potent symbolism that remind his readers of the importance of memory and of a shared language. But these poems are also a series of emotional meditations on fatherhood, growing up poor, and the legacies we leave behind for our families. Deftly using his own experiences, then casting them out into the world so that they become a part of the universal exploration of life and all its intricacies, Armand paints an honest and devastating portrait of what it means to be a father, a husband, and a son. The collection concludes with a series of poetic responses to some of the folk art and traditions of his native South, where he reimagines the remarkable photography of Birney Imes, as well as providing lamentations on the humble beginnings and tragic life of Elvis Presley, a poet and an evangelist in his own right.
Bookmark and Share

Reviews

Review by: William Wright, author of GRASS CHAPELS - May 18, 2022
"This is a beautiful collection. In poem after poem, David Armand recognizes the importance of the familial, the personal, and the ways in which memory lingers and creates new realities. The clarity of these poems, their unimpeded voice, reveals Armand's greatest strength: to tell stories and to tell them well. As in his fine novels, these poems resonate with aural lushness, but the sound never overwhelms the senses. Indeed, one gets the impression that a friend is present, recounting memories--a masterful raconteur whose poetic voice emanates with authenticity and even kindness. Armand's giftedness spans across genres: he is an excellent poet, one whose voice will sustain."
Review by: Robert Lee Kendrick, author of WHAT ONCE BURST WITH BRILLIANCE and WINTER SKIN - May 18, 2022
"These poems immerse the reader in the narrator's reckonings with what was given, and what was taken, by his father, a man who borrows his son's money for beer, challenges him to fist fights, tends a garden that yields more than they can eat, and mends broken things as best he can. In language that captures the rhythms of everyday speech, and line breaks that evoke both the dissonances and harmonies of memory, David Armand reveals the difficult beauty images that flicker with promise and sorrow. This book is suffused with gratitude, understanding, empathy, and loss."
Review by: Jack B. Bedell, author of COLOR ALL MAPS NEW and Poet Laureate of Louisiana, 2017-2019 - May 18, 2022
"Good poems bring us home with them for a spell. They build trust over time and share their experiences with us bit by bit. Great poems, though, feel like home from their first line on. David Armand offers the reader great poems. They are about fathers, and sons, and of a world so real you can smell piney woods and see steam rising off a newborn foal. The joys, and pains, of these poems are at once familial and universal, individual and metonymic. There's not much more you could ask a poem to do, not much more a poet could deliver, than what Armand gives us here."

Goodreads reviews