“So here I go again, away.” As with his first collection, Find A Place That Could Pass for Home, Glenn Shea’s poems here speak of distances: the distances of a restless traveler (“We are on time’s tide, crossing to Aranmor / Carrying to places stranger than day allows.”), the distances of time and death (as in the elegies for poets Jack Gilbert, John Hewitt, and Wislawa Szymborska) and romantic loss (“Lon...
ISBN
978-1-910669-52-5
Pub Date
Friday, December 16, 2016
Cover Image
PALMER, Samuel. The Bright Cloud, 1822-4. Oil and tempera. Reproduced with the permission of Bridgeman Images.
“So here I go again, away.” As with his first collection, Find A Place That Could Pass for Home, Glenn Shea’s poems here speak of distances: the distances of a restless traveler (“We are on time’s tide, crossing to Aranmor / Carrying to places stranger than day allows.”), the distances of time and death (as in the elegies for poets Jack Gilbert, John Hewitt, and Wislawa Szymborska) and romantic loss (“Long miles from you, in / Delhi, even the morning room is dark.”). But in the remembering “something has grown stout,” and the poems reflect, in a final sequence about time spent in the teem and welter of India, a growing devotion to “the gold of busy and familiar day,” and the distances closed by compassion, affection and by poetry itself.
Glenn Shea was born and has lived most of his life in Connecticut. He has worked in the library of a cancer clinic and in the French department of a foreign-language bookshop, washed dishes in the Scottish Highlands, gone to pilgrim’s mass in Santiago, and eaten really good tex-mex in Chengdu. He has read his poems in local libraries and shops and venues in Dublin, Paris and Verona. He works with a group of illuminati in a huge used-book shop in Connecticut. Find A Place That Could Pass For Home, his first collection, was published by Salmon in 2010.
Portrait of the author with Job and Jus de Carotte by Katherine Karlson. The author is on the left.
