Post by shayepoet on May 27, 2008 7:07:16 GMT 2
Keep and Give Away
Susan Meyers
"Keep and Give Away offers us countless resounding, delicate notes.
We might fall, submit to loss, were there no art such as this to keep
us upright in the world."
-- Foreword by Terrance Hayes, author of
Wind in a Box and Hip Logic
**Winner of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) Book Award for Poetry.
**Winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, from the SC Poetry Initiative; Terrance Hayes, judge.
**Winner of the Brockman-Campbell Book Award, from the NC Poetry Society; Rigoberto Gonzalez, judge.
**Winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, from the SC Poetry Initiative; Terrance Hayes, judge.
**Winner of the Brockman-Campbell Book Award, from the NC Poetry Society; Rigoberto Gonzalez, judge.
Sample Poem:
Someone Near Is Dying
To sit for hours by your bed
is to gaze at the day´s periphery,
the chickadee at the feeder fidgeting
like a four-o'clock insomniac.
My desire is to leap into the midst
of forgetfulness, its dreamy scatter.
What does your every move show
if not, I am still alive?
If this moment, bare as twigs,
is the only one, let it be
the limb, in its loose skin
of lichen, tilting at clouds-
not the branch stunted
from lack of promise or light.
The beauty of Spanish moss is the curl
of its beard lifted by wind; of brown
grass, its inclination toward green;
of the chickadee, its brave opinion
of strangers. Listen, Mother-
thunder, out of season: an old woman
at the end of her day, humming.
Reviews for Keep and Give Away:
"Whether Susan Meyers describes the cry of a loon, a boat trip into a
swamp, or casting a net, the images in Keep and Give Away are
striking and resonate with the book's central paradox of loving and
letting go. Though Meyers does not turn from painful experience like
her mother's decline, lingering death, and the black hole of its
aftermath, her dominant impulse is to celebrate and, as she says in
one poem, 'learn to look for the overlooked.' This is a first
collection full of finely crafted poems-free verse and poems in
form-that are alive and radiantly detailed, pleasurable and
poignant."
--Peter Makuck, author of Off-Season in the Promised Land
and Costly Habits
"As I read the final poem of Susan Meyers's first full-length
collection Keep and Give Away, I felt again the resonant ending of
'Shelling: Ars Poetica'-'the last one leaves you wanting more.' In
poems as skillfully crafted as they are inspired, Meyers holds tight
to the tenuous things of this world, polishing and polishing each
until it glows. This is a stunning body of work."
--Cathy Smith Bowers, author of A Book of Minutes
and Traveling in Time of Danger
About the author:
Susan Meyers is the author of Lessons in Leaving, a chapbook selected by Brendan Galvin for the 1998 Persephone Press Book Award. Her poems have appeared in the Southern Review, Crazyhorse, and Tar River Poetry and have been featured online at Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. A longtime writing instructor, she holds an M.F.A. from Queens University of Charlotte. Meyers grew up in North Carolina and currently lives in Givhans, South Carolina, near Summerville.
Verse Daily
ISBN 978-1-57003-670-5, 88 pages. $14.95
USC Press, Tradepaper
[glow=teal,2,300]BUY HERE, BUY NOW:[/glow]
USC Press: www.sc.edu/uscpress/2006/3670.html
Blog: susanmeyers.blogspot.com