Bøger i Southern Messenger Poets serien

An account of spiritual survival through the practice of literary art, the poems in David Huddle's eighth collection, Dream Sender, move among a variety of poetic forms and voices. By turns outrageous and pragmatic, Huddle's poems acknowledge the powerful and disturbing currents of the contemporary world.

In Ghostlight, a long-awaited second collection of original poems by Ryan Wilson, considers the haunting of the contemporary mind. With virtuosic formal variety and masterful craft, these poems range from rural America to Italy to the Holy Land, as they chronicle the dynamism of a spiritual odyssey toward the eternal through both past and present. Wilson employs sonnets, Pindaric and ballad stanzas, alliterative hemistichs in imitation of the Anglo-Saxon, and other ancient forms to enlighten the modern experience, from smartphones and Facebook to jumbo jets, entangled in a reciprocal relationship with myths, sacred literature, and traditions. Revealing that the past and the everlasting can inform the present at any given moment, In Ghostlight conveys how a vision acknowledging this dual illumination helps us understand ourselves and others in our fraught, complex era.

Betty Adcock brings fierce insight to her seventh poetry collection, Rough Fugue. Her elegant stanzas evoke bygone moments of beauty, reflection, and rage. "Let things be spare," she writes, "and words for things be thin / as the slice of moon / the loon's cry snips."

Greg Alan Brownderville's third collection of poetry employs inventive phrasing and vivid imagery to construct a particular life marked by religion, confused by desire, dulled by alcohol, and darkened by death. But Brownderville also skilfully uses humour to soften the disquieting images that haunt these stanzas.

Bobby Rogers's second collection, Social History, listens hard to the voices of American characters and celebrates the gestures of ordinary life. The long lines of his narrative poems trace the undulations of southern speech, and his careful eye for detail reflects the influence of generations of storytellers.

In Christian theology, a skandalon is a distraction from grace, a maze of error where we wander pointlessly, wasting our lives. To the ancient Greeks, a skandalon was the trigger of a trap. T.R. Hummer's labyrinthine new collection encompasses these meanings and more, as its poems take various paths to unexpected destinations.

Inspired by his own work as a cabinetmaker - defined by the peppery dust from the woodworker planing a walnut board, turning an oak spindle at the lathe, or honing chisels while gazing out a window - Steve Scafidi's poems reveal both the tenuous and the everlasting nature of existence.

David Huddle's latest collection shares intimate and amusing stories as if told by a quirky, usually reticent, great uncle. Blacksnake at the Family Reunion continues Huddle's poetic inquiry into the power of early childhood and family to infuse adulthood with sadness and despair.

Sometimes a fact swings down like a hammer and we are changed. The fact of loss, the fact of desire, and all the wild, unruly facts of history hammer down and sparks fly up. This, then, is a collection of facts.

The percussive poems of Stripper in Wonderland move from birth to death, funk to hip-hop, and racism to religion as Derrick Harriell explores the life of a modern black man transplanted from the American Midwest to the Deep South.

Through silence and song, death and rebirth, a sense of wonder pervades every minute of our lives. In The Man Who Saws Us in Half, Ron Houchin explores this idea from the first curiosities of childhood to the gradual skepticism that comes with age and the weight of practical concerns.

A bold, brassy, yet delicate vision of a woman's growth. Imbued with a unique poetic voice that is utterly feminist, these poems possess a fiery intensity for those abuses no woman can ever quite recover from, but also reveal the loving, forgiving temperament of the mother no woman can do without.

Long-lined and often laugh-aloud funny, Kirby's poems are ample steamer trunks into which the poet seems to be able to put just about anything-the heated restlessness of youth, the mixed blessings of self-imposed exile, the settled pleasures of home. As the poet Philip Levine says, "the world that Kirby takes into his imagination and the one that arises from it merge to become a creation like no other, something like the world we inhabit but funnier and more full of wonder and terror. He has evolved a poetic vision that seems able to include anything, and when he lets it sweep him across the face of Europe and America, the results are astonishing." The poems in The House on Boulevard St. were written within earshot of David Kirby's Old World masters, Shakespeare and Dante. From the former, Kirby takes the compositional method of organizing not only the whole book but also each separate section as a dream; from the latter, a three-part scheme that gives the book rough symmetry.

In this eloquent long poem, Claudia Emerson employs the voices of two family members on a small southern farm to examine the universal complexities of place, generation, memory, and identity.

Spiraling between the tenses of time, David Huddle creates in these vibrant poems a defense against the encroachment of age through the resources of language and memory, imagination and art. Moments recollected, and admittedly embellished, from his own life and family seem appealingly familiar.

A second collection of autobiographical "memory poems" by David Kirby. Kirby confides in narrative poems the events he actually or vicariously experienced - as a child, a teen, a young man - as well as some future scenes he imagines. Little Richard, Henry James and others all feature.

T.R. Hummer's new and characteristically pyrotechnic collection takes its title from the rare (in English) singular form of the common word "ephemera". In a work of startling originality, the poet presents a meditation on ephemerality from the point of view of the ephemeron itself as it passes, be it the individual, the atom, the particle.

The scariest sentence in the English language is brief, threatening, and hopeful. It is deceptive, simple, and as common as water: anything is possible. This second collection by Steve Scafidi is haunted by the possible and "the bells of the verb to be" that "ring-a-ding-ding calling us / to the holy dark of this first / warm night of Spring."

A woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. The most personal of Claudia Emerson's poetry collections, Late Wife is both an elegy and a celebration of a rich present informed by a complex past.

In these fifty-five poems that compose Late Leisure, Eleanor Ross Taylor shares dramatic, symbolic, intensely personal outpourings of her evolving consciousness, "myself capriciously ongoing", as poet, woman, and elder.

At ease equally in poetry and prose, David Huddle is an immensely talented writer esteemed for his shrewd powers of observation, ear for authentic voices, and ability to set forth painful truth with stunning effect. Summer Lake is a beautifully coherent compilation of Huddle's best poetry to date.

The title of Ron Smith's new collection comes from Yeats's observation that creators "must go from desire to weariness and so to desire again, and live but for the moment when vision comes to our weariness like terrible lightning, in the humility of the brutes."

From poems of memory and family through its extraordinary voyaging sequences "Via Appia" and "To Ithaca", Ron Smith's Moon Road embodies the experiences and some of the more elusive lessons of marriage, fatherhood, teaching, sports, and travel.

Celebrated poet Julie Kane returns to her Boston Irish Catholic roots in this collection about mothers and daughters shaped by the forces of Irish history and Irish-American culture. Kane confronts how the legacy of personal trauma gets passed down to subsequent generations, with a focus on women from her family history.

A woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. The most personal of Claudia Emerson's poetry collections, Late Wife is both an elegy and a celebration of a rich present informed by a complex past.

"Useless Virtues", T. R. Hummer's seventh book of poetry, is a wide-ranging series of forays into metaphysical territory. Its presiding inquiry concerns the dependency of our consciousness and our spirit on the untrustworthy powers of language.

Molding his artistry and buttressing his response to modern society with the literature of the ancient world, Sidney Burris displays in his work an unabashed reverence for the various traditions, literary, cultural, familial, that guide him, but maintains that these conventions must now and again be interrogated and overthrown.

With a nod toward the grounding inspiration of Mark Twain and James Baldwin in its opening epigraphs, this lush collection of free and formal verse, turning on multiple axes of race, religion, history, politics, and social issues, soars in exploration of the dark, troublesome visions of America.

This superb collection of new and older work shows James Seay's sure progress from the reflection of first influences to the strongly individual voice of his later pieces. As always, Seay evokes a profound sense of history and place, the landscape, colours, scents, and musical vocal cadences of his native South and the world at large.