| Details | | Publication Date: | 1997-01-01 | | Series: | Southern Messenger Poets Series |
| Size | | Length: | 182 pages | | Height: | 9.5 in | | Width: | 6.0 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 16.8 oz |
Publisher's Note
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, colors, scents, and musical vocal cadences of his native South and the world at large. Yet, though the compulsion to "tell stories, when the truth won't work" may be our downfall, Seay shows us that stories are also prisms refracting each seemingly simple moment into infinite complexity. The stories in these beautifully wrought poems offer us swift glimpses of grace - when the fragmentary individual memory flares, is transformed, and becomes the story we have all been waiting for, the one that "frees the body from the fact of itself".
Industry Reviews
Drawing from four previous collections and interspersing some newer poems, Seay (The Light as They Found It) focuses his considerable technical skill on evoking a deliberate sense of history and place. Whether contemplating a friendship gone awry, bringing his son to the grave of his great-grandfather or coming upon a cave in the south of France, the poet's eye is held unwaveringly on his subject, sometimes looking with such dry meticulousness, however, that the poem recedes from view, sinking under the weight of his inward gaze. Yet moments of transcendence are built on details too. "The Majorette on the Self-Rising Flour Sign" depicts a gang of kids sexually fondling a billboard majorette, ending with "But what should also break our hearts is how we thought/ That this was commodity the same as flour that could be bought." Another poem brings us to the speaker's poverty-stricken Mississippi childhood and to Moscow where, as an adult, he searches for the old Faberg? shop, thinking that "maybe to have pissed into the figurative/ wind and a hole in the ground/ is to be drawn to the abstract gloss/ of privilege...." At his best, Seay looks both inward and outward, as in "Where Books Fall Open," in which he considers the heft of a book in his hand and asks: "Where then will our own book fall open/ and with what sweetness of the where we have not been?" Applying his eye for detail with an ear for the unexpected, Seay finds a voice that lifts delicately off the page. (Feb.)
Lopate
Drawing from four previous collections and interspersing some newer poems, Seay (The Light as They Found It) focuses his considerable technical skill on evoking a deliberate sense of history and place. Whether contemplating a friendship gone awry, bringing his son to the grave of his great-grandfather or coming upon a cave in the south of France, the poet's eye is held unwaveringly on his subject, sometimes looking with such dry meticulousness, however, that the poem recedes from view, sinking under the weight of his inward gaze. Yet moments of transcendence are built on details too. "The Majorette on the Self-Rising Flour Sign" depicts a gang of kids sexually fondling a billboard majorette, ending with "But what should also break our hearts is how we thought/ That this was commodity the same as flour that could be bought." Another poem brings us to the speaker's poverty-stricken Mississippi childhood and to Moscow where, as an adult, he searches for the old Faberg‚ shop, thinking that "maybe to have pissed into the figurative/ wind and a hole in the ground/ is to be drawn to the abstract gloss/ of privilege...." At his best, Seay looks both inward and outward, as in "Where Books Fall Open," in which he considers the heft of a book in his hand and asks: "Where then will our own book fall open/ and with what sweetness of the where we have not been?" Applying his eye for detail with an ear for the unexpected, Seay finds a voice that lifts delicately off the page. (Feb.)
Publishers Weekly (12/30/1996)
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