Poet Jeffery Beam
Reviews

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From reviews of Visions of Dame Kind

[It] captures moments of subtle surprise that are like evanescent whispers of the heart. I have this vision of [Beam] lurking on the earth under its plants, listening, silently crawling among blossoms and creatures, suddenly catching a wisp of wonder.
—The late poet and filmmaker James Broughton (letter to author)

[Beam] is one of North Carolina's polished jewels.
—Poet Thomas Rain Crowe (letter to author)

This collection works something like a garden tour, taking us through all seasons, engaging all our senses - each page a small raised bed, well tilled, fertile, carefully planted. This is the kind of poetry that might lead some folks to say, "What's the big deal? I could do that." It's the deception of simplicity. Beam proves over and over again how large a canvas he can paint with a few deft strokes.
—Georgann Eubanks in The Independent Weekly (1995)

What a beautifully wrought book! That haiku essence ... Beyond - logical juxtapositions of image and insight - stretch the poems, bringing them to startling and breath-catching life.
—Poet Will Inman (letter to author)

Sparely, cleanly lovely, all around.
—Novelist Michael Rumaker (letter to author)

I have a true empathy for this - simple purity, hymnal catching of delicate manifestations. I think it is high; and I think it is so American in the best sense.
—Novelist Daphne Athas (letter to author)

Jeffery Beam's ... vision is lyrical, yet exacting as dirt under a leaf, air in a storm. He is North Carolina's lead singer. In Visions of Dame Kind, he is sparely abundant the way he pares to the space between the syllables, leaving a fire, some glowing feel and field as reckoning ... Like Ammons he resides with the lowly which is high. Like D.H. Lawrence he conjures the bruising emotions of being alive, in, and against the world ... Beam must use a beam on his pen - the way his words figure, doing things words cannot do to begin with. Whatever poetry is ... DAME KIND is it!
—Poet and editor Shelby Stephenson in The Pilot (April 1996)

The poetry is admirably restrained ... the imitation of Miss Emily a little miracle.
—Critic and author Guy Davenport (letter to Jonathan Williams)

Sparse gem-like poems with equal dashes of wit & melancholy. Reminiscent of the best haikus and late W. C. Williams. Highly recommended.
—St. Mark's Church in the Bowery Poetry Project Newsletter (April / May 1996)

Visions of Dame Kind is the sun that breaks through two days foggy weather, a clarity that washes nature in its primal colors. The simplicity ... reverberates with the energy we associate with early visionaries like Dickinson and Niedecker. ... A pagan vitality suffuses these poems, thickening one's tongue and body with the taste of minerals and field grasses. Beam has created visions ... made the ordinary, extraordinary.
—Writer and critic Jay Bonner in The Asheville Poetry Review (1996)

Absolutely gorgeous, balanced and honorable - meticulous music and cool restraint.
—Keith Flynn, poet, and editor of The Asheville Poetry Review (letter to author)

The poems ... like Dutch still lives, quiet, delicate, intricate visions ... bear the mark of communion with the moment, as though the self is negated and a Zen-like clarity prevails.
—The James White Review, Walter Holland (Fall 1996)

Poet Jeffery Beam ... is surely making a space for himself on the classics shelf.
—Kanani Kauka, editor, Lambda Book Report (1997)

North Carolina poet Jeffery Beam is one of our hidden treasures. In an era when the often self-absorbed rhetoric of political identity and a return to what is called neo-formalism have received much attention, Beam's four previous books have quietly shown a poet stubbornly and successfully working against the common grain. Now ... Beam has given us his compendium of the garden, a sequence of deceptively simple lyrics. What distinguishes these elemental poems is their vision of "Profound / unisons." Beam throws "a fire at the world" and it is best to follow this poet's admonition: "Guard it / till it blazes."
—Poet Kenny Fries in Lambda Book Report (1997)

The poems in Visions of Dame Kind are apprehensions. The poet's attention is extraordinary. His eye for detail propelled by love of fellowship. Beam's poetic style is reminiscent of Dickinson's brevity; however unlike Dickinson's there is no sadness here - it's been usurped by the wide-eyed influence of Walt Whitman. His style also invokes the late work of Paul Celan, whose poetic verse was compressed in form but open in thought. These small poems, these visions, work as vines in a way, tripping us up with their subtle illuminations. We need only to feel these beautifully crafted poems. In them are seeds of faith and from them we incur the healing power of relationships.
—Unpublished review by poet/critic Mark Roberts (1996)

The synaesthesia of looking to hear subtly initiates ... the identification of the perceiver with the perceived. Beam is hardly what one would consider an Eliotic poet, but like Eliot he gives one the sense of being in genuine dialogue with his predecessors. Most of these have gone into Eliot's vacant interstellar dark, but Beam illuminates them there, rendering them as alive to us as they are to him. Beam's apostrophes are always passionate attempts at communion, and never announced by any awkward, empty "O." Such haiku-like poems...express both in matter and manner the poet's joy in small and evanescent things.
—Editor Robert West in The Carolina Quarterly (1998)

Visions of Dame Kind brought me great pleasure. Ruskin said, "The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and to tell it in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, and there are thousands who can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, philosophy and religion all in one." Here, Here! Till I got to the book matter I'd forgotten I'd had some part in this little treasure. It says about all I know about poetry at this very moment.
—Poet Dan Gerber (letter to author)

The closest thing to a true Eastern poet in the West.
—As introduced by journalist and Duke University Professor Georgann Eubanks at a reading at The Regulator Bookshop in Durham, North Carolina (1995)

Conciseness Zen close-eye affectionate botanical universes' energy aura—like the Bestiary—the idea of condensed visionary plant and animal lore appeals to me.
—Poet Antler (letter to author, 2001)

Jeffery Beam, poet and gardener, understands that human beings are part of the natural world, not observers standing apart from it or lords insisting on remaking it. He makes our connectedness wonderfully clear with poems focused primarily on plants, from dandelions to wildflowers to pumpkins and cabbages and on to lilacs and tulip trees. Gentle poems, tender poems, poems unafraid of death and rejoicing at resurrection. Reading this book lets us go forth into gardens, fields, and woods as part of the green world.
—Janet Lembke, natural history writer and classicist (an Amazon.com review)

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