Poet Jeffery Beam
Reviews

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From reviews of Midwinter Fires

Nominee Pushcart Prize: The Best of the Small Presses.

What I am so smitten with is its consistent sense of motion, never not moving, a feel for the undercurrent, irrational, motion in things.... ringing little poems of large scope. The other aspect is the all-pervasive sensuality beyond the surface-play, sensuous. I found it exceedingly controlled, yet with all the control indicating a passionate pressing at the control. Thus, I was quite enthralled with the balance achieved, nothing sacrificed.
—Novelist H.E. Francis nominating Fires for a Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses (letter to Pushcart)

Beam uses images of light and fire ... to exalt a life outside of life.
—Poet and journalist Dannye Romine in The Charlotte Observer (December 1990)

Jeffery Beam works ... in a style ... quiet and restrained ... exquisitely delicate poems ... quietly ecstatic. The words are as beautifully textured as the binding.
—Fiction writer Philip Gambone and editor Rose Fennell in Lambda Book Report (1990)

It's a pleasure to see someone writing these days so unafraid of beauty in all its manifestations. Your [poems] are fine to come upon and I welcomed them at once to my shelf.
—The late Ronald Johnson, poet and cookbook author (letter to Jonathan Williams)

Now I have my copy of Midwinter Fires. As I read these poems, I can hear you reciting them. Beautiful pieces they are ... in a beautiful-looking book. You are a poet ... and you sing your poems in the true Greek dithyrambic enthusiasm. Have no doubts about yourself.
—The late Wallace Fowlie, poet, memoirist, and scholar of Rimbaud, Proust and Dante (letter to author)

An invocation of elemental (as opposed to astral) demi-gods who might give strength and support. A strong appropriation of a myth central to oppression and fear and its beautiful transformation into a tale of healing, salvation, and acceptance. I find in it a courage and an optimism far beyond my earlier reading.
—Poet Paul Jones, introduction of Beam at Bull's Head Bookshop, UNC-Chapel Hill (April 1990)

Lifting plain speech into sudden eloquence, Beam brings to his poems the quality of a psalm or a pagan hymn. Like the spring lying dormant under the winter landscape, Beam locates the energy beneath the surface of his poems.
—The Asheville Citizen-Times, Book Editor Dale Neal (April 1990)

However beautiful they may be, however graceful, terrible, or overwhelming, they are complete in their self-containment. While the poet is not. He ... is human. And human ... is awkward. And that awkwardness is the empowering grace of Jeffery Beam's poetry. The unexpected word. The ordinary detail in an extraordinary scene. The sudden ornamental eloquence amid a plainness of speech.
—Thomas Meyer, poet and publisher The Jargon Society, introduction of Beam at poetry reading in Asheville, NC (1990)

Email: jeffbeam@email.unc.edu
URL: http://www.unc.edu/~jeffbeam/reviews_midwinter.html
Last updated: August 21, 2008