Pursuit of a Wound: POEMS (Illinois Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Sydney Lea (Author)

Book Description

Series: Illinois Poetry Series | Publication Date: April 20, 2000

"Co-winner of the prestigious Poets' Prize for his collection "To the Bone", Sydney Lea is known for his mastery of the narrative style and his clear and unwavering vision of the natural world and humanity's place in it. His latest work, "Pursuit of a Wound", is marked by this acuity and by his uncanny ear for language as well as his willingness to speak for the unlucky and the dispossessed. Delving in equal measure into the flinty northern New England landscape and the exiled souls of ordinary people, "Pursuit of a Wound" moves beyond Lea's previous work to explore new poetic strategies, including some that approach prose poetry. Combining a free-ranging sensibility akin to Whitman's with a keen attention to verse's formal possibilities, this collection of twenty-eight new poems evokes a beautiful and threatened place and ratifies Lea's status as heir-apparent to Robert Frost."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"How little it took to turn me sentimental. How little it takes me still." Verbatim dialogue, laconic musings, self-interruptions, givings-up and quiet goings-on all mark Lea's seventh collection, following the new & selected To the Bone, the well-received novel A Place in Mind and the naturalist essays of Hunting the Whole Way Home. Lea's plainspoken New England voice has benefited from its multi-genre development, making the poems here easy in diction, resistant to lyric flights and focused on making sense of things. As he notes above, however, the poet refuses to deny his more emotive side, which is alternately a strength and a weakness here. It is what lays behind the restless political energy of "Our Camp '63 ("the fucked-up notion that a summer church day camp allowed/ us to do something to help a nation in its narcosis rectify/ the deaths, countless, in bilge-watery choleric slave ships and what followed// and follows ") but is also behind the many rigid attempts at giving the poems a sense of closure, as when "Authority" talks of a storekeeper who would "wave his flipper and talk on local matters/ (though he'd never let the meat get overcooked)" and ends "Full above our river, the moon appears/ authoritative. Grins from ear to ear." The verse's scaled-back ambitions at such moments nevertheless give Lea's everyday characters--"Mack" on a visit to "the fancy new clinic"; "the warden cop and vet" who all report "the coon must be destroyed"; "thousands of pumpkins in Wally Morse's fields"; and the poet himself among many others--credible voices and fittingly modest appeal.

Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The "wound" in the title of this seventh collection by Lea (former editor of the New England Reviewer) refers to the "palimpsest of ruin" on which he writes every new poem. Lea anatomizes car wrecks, burnings, dysfunctional families, and victims of stroke and cancer, "the wide world's wealth of wrong." Like his mentor Frost, Lea vividly contextualizes these tragedies in his beloved rural New England, a vanishing place of sumac, evergreens, snowy ridges, rock bass, and grouse. Never sentimental or mawkishly confessional, he writes honestly about his own loss of hearing and insomnia and his need for "happy pills" (Zoloft). Lea is equally comfortable, it seems, with tragedy or beauty, and therein lies his considerable strength. As he says, "I just like the life of which each detail is eloquent." Written in a new style of verse blocks and prose poetry, this is a highly moving and accessible work, strongly recommended for all larger poetry collections.DDaniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, IL
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press (April 20, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0252068173
• ISBN-13: 978-0252068171
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,430,373 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sydney Lea is Poet Laureate of Vermont. A recipient of fellowships from the MacArthur, Rockefeller and Fulbright Foundations, Lea founded, and for thirteen years edited, NEW ENGLAND REVIEW. Retired after 43 years of college teaching, he is active in literacy and conservation efforts in northern New England. He has published ten volumes of poetry (most recently SIX SUNDAYS TOWARD A SEVENTH, Wipf & Stock), a novel, and two collections of naturalist essays. A book of memoiristic essays, NOW LOOK, is forthcoming in September 2012 from Skyhorse Publishing, as is A HUNDRED HIMALAYAS,a selection of literary criticism (University of Michigan Press).