Customer Reviews

A Slender Grace: Poems

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Rod Jellema's "A Slender Grace" is a generous offering (105 pp.)of generous poems by a poet who knows how to say Yes. Poets, and those who love poetry, are always looking for that "Slender grace that takes you past yourself" and lets you remember that, no matter the dark, the light is surely coming. Finding, as good poets do, delight in the small things: gray boxcars, bicycle parts, the crowing of cocks, a vagrant sneaker, the spinning of a dryer at the Laundromat,he offers us in gentle tones the way toward the hopeful light.

Jellema's poems also take as their subject a trip he took to Nicaragua in 1985 as a volunteer in the Witness for Peace delegation (six poems), three poems for Vincent Van Gogh, and fine riffs on the cricket blues, Blind Willie Johnson, and "Bix Beiderbecke Composing Light."

His language is accessible, his joy in language is palpable. His images wake the reader to his "double vision," the diction is impeccable, the total effect stimulating. One wants to pick up a pen and write toward his light. One is happy to be able to return again and again to this master seeker and wordsman.

Martin Galvin

A Slender Grace collects 67 poems, almost all of them new, the first such poetry anthology published by author and poet Rod Jellema in almost twenty years. Using free verse to paint winding pictures of vagrancies of daily life, and the struggle to reach for a glimmer of hope when surrounded by darkness, A Slender Grace is emotional, captivating, deftly penned, and speaks directly to the heart in a body of inspiring work urging the reader to never surrender to despair. Lullaby at Lake Michigan: Hush now. / Night's / what we missed all day. / The sun before she lit out / over the lake / over the unseen edge of the world / (Wisconsin) // pastured out / to her dark / empty fields and fields / her herds and herds / of little lights / that whisper to you // as they gaze / up there / (listen) / far and far.

Over the past 12 months, I've read and reread this treasure. Jellema's poetry is grounded in the eccentricities of lived experience. Drawing from a rich canvass of music, life stories, art and history, Jellema weaves an tapestry of graced living.

When I sit down to study, I've been pausing and spending a few minutes breathing in a Jellema poem. His writing does what I think good poetry can do, it helps me to pay attention and listen to the rhythms of the Spirit.

Rod Jellema's poems take me to the center of my soul and allow me to discover there the gift of the quotidian miracle that is everyday living.