Search results for ""Mark Jarman" "The Heronry""

Book SynopsisThis poignant collection of masterful elegies centers on the revelatory ways in which the speaker reconciles love, loss, and grief’s legacy. Following her mother’s battle with colon cancer and her own crisis of meaning, Henning culminates the collection with her rediscovery of joy in life’s small moments.Trade ReviewSara Henning’s Terra Incognita opens with a dream, and the poems undo us the way dreams do, with imagery that is seared into our minds so completely we can’t shake it. I left this book reluctantly, a little dazed, and wanting to go back inside the world Henning created, "the sky dusk-raw," "the stars ‘moving braille." Terra Incognita is a rare book of poems, and Henning is a rare talent. -- Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones and Goldenrod“Grief turns out to be a place none of us knows until we reach it," Joan Didion once declared. Sara Henning crafts beautiful and protean music out of the terra incognita of motherlessness. The gallery of richly evoked lines and incidents suggests the poet is a dynamic, at-the-ready elegist for all she sees. "In the belly of every summer day is a god / taking its first breath, so I learn to call it praying, / my mother forsaking the AC for a grace called smoking / in the car." Yes, one of the book’s major triumphs is that Henning, with artful precision and a daughter’s utmost love, makes the vital woman who was her first window on the world count for the reader as well. -- Cyrus Cassells, 2021 poet laureate of TexasIn Sara Henning’s stunning elegies, the mundane sears and sparks, infused with the speaker’s fierce grief. These poems accelerate, their energetic lines and images fueled by Henning’s imaginative precision and a lyricism that pops with its verbs and trills, whether telling a story of a mare’s head thrust into the window of a Chevy Nova, or the loss of a baby, or a mother’s Dilaudid-induced hallucinations of violent abduction while dying of cancer. The poems of Terra Incognita are thrilling with their vibrancy and beauty in the face of loss. -- Rebecca Morgan Frank, author of Oh You Robot Saints!In Terra Incognita, Sara Henning gives us a passionate group of elegies for her mother and an equally intense set of odes to her marriage. The territory she explores may be unknown ground, as her title suggests, but the poet knows where she stands. At every turn these poems are totally imaginative, totally alive. -- Mark Jarman, author of The Heronry: Poems and Dailiness: Essays on PoetryTable of ContentsI. Terra Inferna Terra Inferna Elegy with Saltwater Taffy Queening Mom’s Eggs Elegy Beginning with the Birth of a Mountain God of the Kitchen Window French Fries Smoking in the Car Cancer Here Be Dragons II. Terra Incognita Terra Incognita Elegy for the Color Pink Once, I Prayed in the Water Woman in Flames The Boy God, You Are a Muscadine Still Life with Smoke Elegy with Blueberries Death Buried the Daughter I Was What the Time-Share Man at the Westgate Hotel Tried to Sell Me III. Terra Nova Terra Nova IV. Terra Firma Terra Firma Last Stash Traitor Angels Mercy Villanelle Elegy in the Shape of a River Weather Haibun They Call Her Mi Corazon My Mother Comes Back as a Dragonfly Cherishing Winter Gazebo Acknowledgments Notes

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Book SynopsisDavid Mason was born in Washington State, forty-odd degrees north latitude, and now lives on the Australian island of Tasmania, forty-odd degrees south latitude. That Pacific crossing is the work of a lifetime of devotion and change. The rich new poems of Pacific Light explore the implications of the light as well as peace and its opposing forces. What does it mean to be an immigrant and face the ultimate borders of our lives? How can we say the word home and mean it? These questions have obsessed Mason in his major narrative works, The Country I Remember and Ludlow, as well as his lyric and dramatic writing. Pacific Light is a culmination and a deepening of that work, a book of transformations, history and love, endurance and unfathomable beauty, by a poet “at the height of his powers.”Trade Review"A poet known for his narratives, like Ludlow, the acclaimed historical-novel-in-verse turned opera, David Mason curates the archipelago of intensely satisfying lyric poems in Pacific Light with the skill of a consummate storyteller." —Siham Karami, Los Angeles Review of Books "Mason is a poet defined by place, if it is Southeast Asia on the Pacific Rim or Northwest America, his poems breathe life of the people around him as well as the nature he observes and partakes in." —g emil reutter, North of Oxford “With narrative clarity, . . . the poet manages to convey the tremulous geologic mystery of the whole world, and the smallness of our place within it. . . . Pacific Light is saturated with a lifetime’s worth of reflection, and mature and complex in its expression.”—Kjerstin Kauffman, Literary Matters “Pacific Light may be a summing up, but it is also a new beginning, a book that marvels at the world while confronting loss through the lens of joy. Though individually dazzling, its poems combine to stunning effect, equaling—or even surpassing—the very best in Mason’s superb body of work.” —Ned Balbo, Think Journal The sonic pleasures of David Mason’s Pacific Light carried me swiftly through this stunningly crafted collection. Each poem is at its best read aloud, the accomplished rhythms emerging as a lilt and ease, a physical pleasure of the human mouth and lungs. These stories, meditations, monologues, and love songs slowly develop an expansive vision of the natural world in which the speaker is observer and participant, a brushstroke in the painting, forever in relationship to memory, to history, and to the Earth. What emerges across these poems is a full life lived in communion; what emerges across these poems is wisdom. —Jason Schneiderman, author of Hold Me Tight As a poet of America’s Pacific Northwest, David Mason has found its mirror reflection in Australia’s Southeast. Turned upside down by love, he has learned “to walk upright under the Southern Cross.” Generously, he extends his feeling of renewal to all of us and urges us “to let all discovery / teach us to love the globe, that troubled child.” In Pacific Light, David Mason, one of our indispensable poets, shares his discovery of a new world—and amazingly, it turns out to be this one. —Mark Jarman, author of Dailiness and The Heronry In the last stanza of the last poem in David Mason’s startling and soulful new book of poems, Pacific Light, the poet writes: The effort of a life, the wasted hour,the kind word given to a stranger’s childare understood as kin and disappear.Time to be grass again. Ongoing. Wild. This stanza testifies to last things: the last journey, the last shape shifting, the last immigration in a book filled with such arrivals and departures. The formal rigor of the poems—handled with an easy and almost offhand poise—only accentuates the sense of almost constant movement, which is at the heart of the book. This book is the story of a life's deepening and reconfiguration. As such, it both inspires and challenges the reader in ways that only poetry can do. What a pleasure to read a book of poems by a poet at the height of his powers, a poet whose life has been transformed and whose poems are the embodiment of that transformation. —Jim Moore, author of Underground: New and Selected Poems "It’s not a simple book celebrating his new home; nor is it a book of nostalgia. Pacific Light encompasses the full reach of a life well lived, by any definition." —Geoff Page, Australian Book Review David Mason wrote for LARB David Mason wrote for The Woven Table

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