The Lord and the General Din of the World: Poems [Paperback]

Jane Mead (Author), Philip Levine (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1996

Jane Mead was educated at Vassar College, Syracuse University, and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and has taught at several schools in the San Francisco Bay area, at Colby College, and in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, In 1991, State Street Press published her long poem "A Truck Marked Flammable" as a chapbook. Her individual poems have been widely published in such places as The New York Times, Best American Poetry of 1990, American Poetry Review, The Virginia Quarterly, Ploughshares, and The Antioch Review. In 1992, she received a Whiting Writers' Award.

"Mead's poems lay bare a pathology that evidences the world and the self as illness and cure, where language bears the hellish and the holy fruit of its culture. Mead unsettles me. And I'm grateful."-American Book Review

"Waiting for redemption from on high is a futile hope, and from that sudden understanding comes the animating imagination that carries these poems along. They read with an ease exceptional in poetry today, and at times with a playfulness akin to some of Roethke's last books."-Rain Taxi

"Jane Mead-Poet. Author of what may be the best book of poems for 1996-The Lord and the General Din of the World."-The Bloomsbury Review

"The Lord and the General Din of the World, spoken in an intensely open voice . . . suggests that the only stable existential presence can be created in the language of art. But at every turn the relationship between language and identity is questioned."-The Journal

"[These poems] may change your view of what has meaning in the madness of American culture. Such poetry could easily become tediously clinical or unbearably despairing, as so many poems on the subject are. In fact, Mead never lets the reader off easy the unearned hope or resolutions. She does reveal, however, possibilities for redemption."-Small Press Review

"These are not poems to be read silently, in a comfortable corner or chair. . . . [Mead's] poems enriched my appreciation of words and image and life in general."-Hodge Podge Poetry

"Anyone who admires visceral, jolting, in-your-face poetry will be rightly enthusiastic about this debut by Jane Mead. . . . Mead's la

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The confessional, lyric poems in Mead's stark, commanding first collection were selected by Philip Levine for the 1995 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. Mead combines flinty honesty with an organic intellect (as when she arches the work of Bach and Van Gogh over transcendent moments in daily life). She employs taut, colloquial language and firmly places her personal history against a searching, almost existential understanding of the world-even at its most difficult. Many of these powerful, subtle poems concern her father's heroin addiction, focusing on how that life changes, or skews, what it means to be human. Mead pinpoints, and gives form to, tenuous, seemingly nameless emotions ("Somewhere there should be a place/ the exact shape of my emptiness-/ there should be a place/ responsible for taking one back"). That precision gives her poetry, though often spawned of rough subject-matter (addiction, abuse, suicide and profound isolation), the power of expertly cut gems.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Crossed and recrossed with a plain speech that is haunting in its directness, Mead's language firmly places the fact of suffering back on our plate. Yet she doesn't force us to eat, nor does she insist that we take her word for it--but we do take her at her word. These fully realized poems remind us of Robert Lowell's darker half--not as worldly, though worldly enough to make us feel as though we've taken a very long journey. And hers is a psalm or a prayer that we can understand; even when her pen leans into the very insular facts of a father in detox and his cruel role in her childhood, the echo of her song is understood, and a real sense of her experiences comes across. Jane Mead is well deserving of the literary prizes she has won, and her first book is well deserving of many readers she is sure to gain. Raul Nino --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Sarabande Books (January 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0964115115
• ISBN-13: 978-0964115118
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,426,184 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful and Moving, June 2, 2000

By 

John Boddie - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Lord and the General Din of the World: Poems (Paperback)

One of the first things you note is that Philip Levine's introductory note seems to be at a loss for words. It's understandable once you start reading. The pieces in this book are what poetry strives to be and usually falls short of. Mead's command of the language does not come across as effortless, rather it comes across as a true command, sure in its phrasing, confident in its images. It creates a deep and lasting resonance in the reader, calling out more of the truth about ourselves and our relation to the world than we are usually comfortable with.

This book changed the way I read poetry in much the same way as reading the Charters translation of "Baltics" did. It established for me a new reference point, a new vision of what is possible.

5.0 out of 5 stars Utterly fantastic., September 20, 2006

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Lord And The General Din Of The World: Poems (Hardcover)

Julie Mead, The Lord and the General Din of the World (Sarabande, 1996)

I have some years where every book of poetry I touch turns out to be a hideous, steaming pot of dirt soup that should never have been published, and I have some years where every time I crack the cover on a volume by an author I've never read before, I discover pure gold. 2006 is rapidly turning into one of the latter years; I discovered the brilliance of David Berman last month, and now I happen upon Julie Mead's debut collection, The Lord and the General Din of the World.

I'll warn you flat out-- this is not a happy book. In fact, it's one of the most relentlessly downbeat books I've had the pleasure of happening across since Final Exit, Derek Humphry's masterpiece on ways to off oneself. And it's the kind of poetry that, in general, causes those who are not used to reading poetry to cringe. Allusions and symbols and subtext, oh my! But still, while angst-poetry is as common as salt in the Adriatic, Mead's stuff never comes off as simple angst-poetry; as one wag said many years ago of the first Death in June album (paraphrased, unfortunately, by yours truly, who doesn't have the quote to hand), Mead's work is equipped with a grim humour capable of slaughtering a thousand renegade Bunnymen:

"The blue smoke turns to water
in my lungs. Gale brings out
the pornographic comics she's working on,
in which her history teacher
meets an embarrassing end.
The teacher's kidnapped-- ransom set.
Nobody pays. The ransom is reduced
and reduced again. It would be awful--
ransom demanded and nobody
so much as notices. We laugh."
(--"On the Lawn at the Drug Rehab Center")

Her subject matter doesn't usually differ from the sort of thing one finds on repositories (which shall here remain blessedly nameless as so not to give them even more exposure) of such angst: there's drug rehab (as mentioned above), recovery, and, of course, the reason we went there in the first place; there is death, usually somewhat messy; there is somber contemplation of the landscape, even. But it is Mead's sense of craft that makes it all work so well, and it does all work so well. This is excellent work, and deserves to be widely read. **** ½

5.0 out of 5 stars Unflinchingly honest...exquisitely crafted, February 22, 2006

By 

Robert Nazarene (Elsah, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Lord and the General Din of the World: Poems (Paperback)

Jane Mead's "The Lord and the General Din of the World" introduces us as readers to a poet of such strength and power...unseen since, perhaps, the work of Sylvia Plath. She writes with unflinching honesty, plumbing the depths of the human interior, composing about pain and loss in a manner which many readers might dare not speak or think or dream of. Her quietness and control is all the more unsettling: a hallmark of our greatest poets. Her timing is flawless. In this her first book, she establishes her mastery instantly and beyond any question.