Poet Jeffery Beam
Reviews
From reviews of An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold
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Winner of an American Institute of Graphic Arts 50 Books / 50 Covers award for 1999
Winner of a 2000 IPPY Award for one of the 10 Outstanding Small Press / Independent Publisher Books of 1999 (special notation for Best Book Arts Craftsmanship) from Independent Publisher magazine
Exhibit winner of the Duke University's 1998-1999 Best
Campus
Visual Arts Event chosen by the student newspaper the Duke
Chronicle: "This excellent collaboration ... presented
wonderfully sharp images of real (sic) and imaginary beasts
with evocative poetry. The combination of
factors—visual
images with text—made the show extraordinary. It wasn't
the
most elaborate exhibit to prowl onto campus, but it was
certainly the most captivating."
—Duke University student arts weekly Recess of the Duke
Chronicle, Norbert Schürer (April 1999)
Thou beast
Thou bestial beauty
What a frabjous menagerie
in thy corral
It is perfectly beastly
this chorale of beastliness
this best of bestiality
Bravo and blessing from James
the old old unicorn boy
—The late poet and filmmaker James Broughton (letter to
author)
This new Bestiary reveals the demonic ark of beasts that
are
caged or run wild in the human psyche...The drawings are
primeval, they arise out of mythic times and reveal how modern
art can delve a root into a pre-cultural world of fear and
visions. [The poet] writes with extraordinary insight and
subtle suggestiveness. He clearly believes each creature is
alive somewhere in the modern world, inward, outward, or both.
His poems extend the firsthand presences of the beasts and
bring them into human focus, even for those of us who deny
such creatures inhabit our darker places. All in all, An
Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold offers a gripping experience and
an awareness of our shadow side that needs to be revealed
again and again in a world of denial.
—Poet Will Inman (unpublished review)
What a sumptuous and elegant book, text, design,
illustrations, print, cover. It is a pleasure just to hold it
and savor the pages. It's rare to see such a combination of
talents brought together here.
—Poet Robert Morgan (letter to author)
The Bestiary book is absolutely beautiful thanks to so many
hands and minds and imaginings. I loved especially "Phoenix"
and "Dragon," but as I name those, one after another comes
crowding in. The whole thing sets up echoes and memories,
some of them Biblical....I don't know why, but your multiple
collection of creatures made me think of Edward Lear who
shifted Psalm 102 and the pelican in the wilderness to the
"pelican in the pilderpips." The drawings are extraordinary,
not least because even those that might have been frightening
are mysteriously consoling.
—The late philosopher and poet Elizabeth Sewell (letter
to author)
What a way to do a book! I love that you got "rue" in a
poem.
And Ippy Patterson's illustrations come right out of divine
and mythic gifts ... supreme things, pencil as magic.
—Poet and editor Shelby Stephenson (letter to
author)
An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold is a delightful
collaboration
anchored by poet Jeffery Beam's contemporary re-working of
Elizabethan sources; Ippy Patterson's fantastical,
Sendak-esque illustrations, and photographer M. J. Sharp's
photographs of Beam as he performs these poems.
—The Spectator, Michele Natale (1999)
[The poems] are painstakingly honed to be as descriptive,
as
mystical, and as metaphysical as any from Elizabethan times.
Recapturing those hidden, subterranean demons, and those
joyful, leaping beasts that are the stuff of our dreams, the
book combines, on either page facing, the animal on the left,
and the verse upon the right. It is between these two pages
that the soul of each animal is pressed. The creatures have
been...masterfully illustrated by Patterson in detail rarely
seen in modern times. A book that is as delightful to see and
hold as to read.
—Reporter Alan Hall in The Chapel Hill News (1999)
[A] most magnificent Bestiary Retold. It's so
extraordinary!
You're due for a MacArthur, and if I were on the committee I'd
bring you to their attention! I'm honored to have been a help
to you in the beginning and continue as a supporter and
admirer of your work.
—Michael Sykes, publisher, Floating Island Publications
(publisher of Beam's first book The Golden Legend—letter
to author)
Part of the point of An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold: It
challenges our perception of reality and encourages us to
think with our imagination rather than our reason....The
pictures, which require a minute or two of observation before
one catches all minutiae, perfectly represent the points made
by the text. For instance, when the hippopotamus is
"Bloodletting itself by / sharp reeds," or when the dolphin is
"Enamored especially of / little boys," we see this in the
drawing. They give no indication of the reality status of
their subjects, but they do let us know, as Beam puts it, that
the world is "serious, divine, mysterious and playful [and]
promises us that the Imagination is primary to human life."
That is a pretty strong point to make, and Beam does an
admirable job in making it.
—Duke University Chronicle, Norbert Schürer (February
1999)
This book is an amazing collaboration...The individual
hand-loved feel of the book is as impressive as its artistry.
Pen and ink drawings by Patterson must have sent the artist
close to blindness. Beam...generates odes that bring the
book into our world with a mix of classic and contemporary
expression. The careful presentation extends into the
Afterward, which includes notes that explain the book's
history, meaning, and the artists' process of creation.
—Children's author Susie Wilde in The Chapel Hill News
(May 9,1999 and at Wilde's now extinct home page)
An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold is a visionary literary
effort. Thanks to Patterson's gorgeous (and outrageous)
depictions...and Beam's worrisome accompaniments, one can
cower afresh in the wake of the many-headed Hydra.
—Mountain Xpress: Weekly Independent News, Arts & Events for
Western North Carolina (June 1999)
To say that An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold is a beautiful
book is an understatement. It feels like a fine piece of
goods. Its making is a work of art. Jeffery Beam's poems
create the animals and evoke fables and gods and goddesses
that live in our consciousness as surely as body and soul are
one. Ippy Patterson's fine line drawings and M. J. Sharp's
photographs of the poet complement perfectly a balance rarely
achieved in words, illustrations, and photography. The
elementary possibilities of the deep about to rise into
permanence shapes the creatures here. The book is a
collaborative wonder.
—Poet and editor Shelby Stephenson in The Pilot and
Small Press Review (May 24, 1999 and September - October
1999)
This book of original poems by gay poet Jeffery Beam
follows
the form of the traditional bestiary.
&8212;
Lambda Book Report devoted a two-third-page spread to
reprinting a poem and drawing from the book (March 1999)
Horse & Buggy Press tackles it's most ambitious project
[with]
An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold.
—American Booksellers Association Book Web "Bookselling This
Week: Riding a Horse & Buggy into the 21st Century", Susan
Houston (August 24, 1998)
Like most of Beam's work, these poems spill down and across
the page in a manner recalling Charles Olson, Paul Blackburn,
and others of the Black Mountain school (and William Carlos
Williams before them); they are scored like pieces of music,
with breaks and spaces suggesting breaths, accents, and
changes in tempo. To my mind Beam is the best poet now
working in this form. For every animal there is an
illustration: the drawings are quite essential to the book as
the poems. Ippy Patterson's art is remarkably detailed
and—with the exception of the appropriately tame
illustration for
"The Cat"—phantasmagoric. The most memorable drawings
are
those conveying ferocity, such as her renderings of the whale,
the elephant, and the mythical Manticore. There are also
three fine photographic portraits of Beam by M. J. Sharp; in
keeping with the book's underlying primitivism, she casts him
as a kind of shaman, caught mid-story or mid-spell. Mention
should also be made of Dave Wofford's beautiful book design:
at a time when releases from many New York publishers are
showing a stunning disregard for the book as an aesthetic
object, An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold reminds us that
bookmaking is itself an art.
—Robert West, Editor, in The Carolina Quarterly
(1999)
Beam's latest book carries his readers to a new level of
the
magical and the mystical. The Beasts are brought to life not
only by the vocabulary Beam chooses to describe them, but also
through another manifestation of Beam's poetical genius: his
ability to craft the tone and rhythm of a poem to suggest its
subject. [Ippy Patterson's] talent for producing exquisitely
detailed line drawings made her art the perfect companion.
But the best way to really experience how alive these
creatures are...is to hear him perform the lines himself.
His vocal gymnastics lend each creature a personality,
distinct and unique.
—East Cooper Monthly, Sullivan's Island, Charleston,
Reporter Delacey Skinner (September 1999)
Beam's poems...are short and spare, almost haiku-like,
fraught with mysticism and hints of strange tales from far-off
lands. Like calligraphic painting, they capture each creature...in
a few precisely placed strokes. Patterson's facing
illustrations depict each fantastic creature in sumptuous
detail, in a glory of precise line and delicate
cross-hatching.
—Reporter Dave Hart in The Chapel Hill News (July
2000)
When, in his poem "Vixen," W. S. Merwin writes of "the
silence
after the animals," he means something permanent—an
apocalypse—something he names elsewhere "the total
city."
For over thirty years Merwin has been prophesying a world in
which humankind has utterly plundered the globe, having
squeezed out one species after another in it relentless
Malthusian expansion. It is a bleak prospect, one we prefer
not to think about: it is, after all, the unthinkable. ...
To act the prophet, to call attention to the likelihood of
disaster—that is one legitimate response. To re-enchant
us
with the natural world we have been warring against—that
is
another. And that is the response we find in the work of
Jeffery Beam. An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold recalls the
wonder with which our ancestors regarded the animals. ... It
reminds us that if divinity inhabits the world, it inhabits
the whole world, and not only our particular species. It we
accept the gift of this reminder, if we wake again to the
strange beauty of the creatures around us, we may yet avert
the total city.
—Robert West, Editor, introduction at UNC-Chapel Hill
reading (November 1999)
Your work is a living miracle: so much music—like
honey—pooled therein.
—Poet George Elliott Clarke (letter to author)
(Beam's) chef d'oeuvre is An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold,
an
antic, beautifully illustrated, award-winning collection of
his poems on mythical beasts.
—Janet Lembke, natural history writer and classicist
(reference letter to Orange Arts Council)
It celebrates the variety of human dreaming, and the
multiplicity of earth's creatures, and will enchant children
and adults.
—North Carolina Library Association E-News (October
1999)
Beam's Bestiary effectively worked within this
multi-disciplinary program to educate children about the
importance of biodiversity and the need to protect our natural
resources.
—North Carolina Library Association Roundtable on the
Status of Women in Librarianship Newsletter (July 2000)
Beam's Bestiary poems are often haiku-like, elliptical in
form, mystical in content, and redolent at times with darkest
fantasy. They are perfect expressions of his stated desire
"to access that mystical supernatural part of the inner world"
that is available to children but lost as we grow.
—Betty Hodges in The Durham Herald-Sun feature article "Jeffery
Beam: Poetry Factory" (February 28, 1999)
Delightful, insightful, heart-ful—the idea of
condensed
visionary plant and animal lore appeals to me.
—Poet Antler (letter to the author, 2001)
Email: jeffbeam@email.unc.edu
URL: http://www.unc.edu/~jeffbeam/reviews_bestiary.html
Last updated: September 26, 2008