Poet Jeffery Beam
Reviews
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So minimal & so lush all at once, their titles become
them.
Their beauty is about the huge pleasure of omission, & the
powerful delicacy of what stays. So what stays can never be
sentimental. They are quite sublime. Sacramental. A collection
to keep beside a bed. Where they might seep into the sleeping
head like pearls.
—Artist Ippy Patterson
[Jeffery Beam is] a pilgrim on this vegetable earth & in
its
feathered air. [He is] a thrush in a tree, [he] wrestles a
worm, detonates the woods. [He is] the sun. I think [these
poems are] numinous, as any gospel should be. [The] fractured
freestyle encapsulates the random serendipities of the natural
world. I am thrilled to see it inhabited by many birds as well
as plants & insects. [He's] right: "Nature's intention
flight
of birds." What I love most is the poems' connectedness to
their subjects. [Jeffery Beam does] not see humankind as
separate from all else but rather as an intrinsic part of
creation sharing equally with moth, acanthus leaf, black gum,
& nuthatch. Down with dominion! Here's to courting earth's
acceptance.
—Naturalist, classicist, essayist Janet Lemke.
There are poems here of extraordinary hush & beauty. I
particularly like the ones in which arrangement &
line-breaks
break the syntax into another shape or made syntax strange.
This opened out feelings or space within which to feel. The
relationship between the force that made those separations or
estrangements was not always equal to lyric flourishes, but I
did not mind this, or rather, would not want this worked out,
as it seemed to me that this unevenness was in its own way a
rhythm of attention & grief / witness that was true. We
are,
alas, not completely constant in love.
—Poet David Need
I am knocked out by their plain beauty.
—Poet & translator Ann McGarrell
You have my favourite book by Jeffery Beam.
—English poet, David Preece.
Gospel Earth is thrilling and choice. And they work their
spell so visually, both in imagery and in layouts that strike
me as equivalent to Lee Wiley's phrasing of jazz standards.
—Painter James McGarrell
These are beautiful. I especially like the the reference to
the "shoulders" of the black gum—what a perfect
description.
—Botanist Jason Fridley
Gospel Earth is transcendent.
—Andrew Hughes, Editor Frame & Tight
I'm writing to say that I read Gospel Earth and greatly
enjoyed it, the careful syllabic construction of the lines,
like chewing on good fruit, a large peach, like that, not sure
I can describe it, but the lines are gnarled in a good way,
designed to get the maximum bang from each syllable. … The
whole a bit of a macro of the micro, in the sense that the
poems sit a bit together one by one, as does the whole piece,
shifting downwards and across.
—Dutch poet Cralan Kelder
Jeffery Beam has shared a myriad of his publications with
us.
He hovers around that legendary region of North Carolina that
brings out hollerin', poets, real singers, and a certain fine
strangeness. He makes his living in the library trade and
edits an excellent journal called "Oyster Boy". When he wrote
and described to me his new piece of work titled "Gospel
Earth" the title alone had me ask to see it all, even though I
knew it would be much too large for us to publish. The poems
came eerily out of gloom, sunlight splash, beast powers and
something akin to spirituals. It got real messy on my hands
and in my head and thoroughly unavoidable so we went and
printed it all and posted it on-line. Share the powers. I
could have edited it down to a two sleeve foldout but I went
even more dangerously thin and chose a one sleeve hollowing
booklet. Less is more unless you want it all.
—Bob Arnold, Longhouse Booksellers and Publishers
[publishers of Gospel Earth in Longhouse Bibliography
from 1971-2006]
Gnomic beauties.
—Poet Josh Hockensmith
Email: jeffbeam@email.unc.edu
URL: http://www.unc.edu/~jeffbeam/reviews_gospel.html
Last updated: August 20, 2008
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