Poet Jeffery Beam
Reviews

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From reviews of Submergences

Nominee American Library Association Gay / Lesbian Non-fiction Book Award.

Submergences is a manual of the body and soul, of the self and "the other," of the secular and divine in poetry and prose. Beam writes distinctly in the line of poets from Edward Taylor through Dickinson, Emerson...Ammons. Beam is North Carolina's Whitman, bringing the dark and light together in soaring and swooping strains of syllables that makes a music rare in our times. ... His singing is as original as the sun or moon or stars.
—Poet and editor Shelby Stephenson in The Pilot (September 1997)

[Submergences] is inventive, energetic, stunning. "Magical communion" of body and spirit is the premise, and by addressing such a heavy issue Beam puts himself in direct line with Emerson, Whitman, Ashbery, and, the too much ignored James Broughton. Beam's language is imagistic, automatic, deliberate, abstract, and mystic, which is refreshing, especially in this climate of overwhelmingly boring academic poetry.
—Nomination for the 1997 American Library Association Gay / Lesbian Non-Fiction Book Award by poet/critic Mark Roberts

In "Findings" a favorite poem of mine published in Visions of Dame Kind (The Jargon Society), Beam wrote: "I took the apple / from where it fell / & went down / under the grass / under the pasture's last / wave of / goldenrod light / where the mole's / inner sanctum lies / where the apple seed / is a bead of sweat / in the cool earth. // I found there: / the sun & the / third thing." If it doesn't tell you right off, I will: Submergences is the third thing.
—Damon Sauve, Publisher and editor of Oyster Boy Review, and publisher of Submergences from Off the Cuff Books, introducing Beam at the Bull's Head Bookshop, UNC-Chapel Hill

[A] miniature yet expansive and compelling book that dwells in the underworld of the creative process.
—Poet Charles Fort (letter to author)

Surreal dominion of Submergences: A mysterium exfoliation.
—Poet Antler (letter to author, 2001)

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