Overview

"In these unsettling pandemic times, former Wisconsin Poet Laureate Max Garland offers poems of grace, resilience, and healing remembrance. These are poems of remembering, not only the anguish and isolation of the global pandemic, during which most were written, but also remembering as a creative or restorative force. Max Garland's poems walk on a wire of remnant faith that even in the news-glutted age of social media, there's a role for poetry, ""...news that Stays news,"" as one poet put it nearly a century ago. There's an evocative range: from the surrealistic conjurings of a child's mind at bedtime, to the fragmented memory of an aging widow, struggling to recall the details of her life, or if not the details, at least the emotional truth of that life, realizing that for her, ""Memory is more like poetry than poetry."""

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9781737405108

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Reviews

for The Postal Confessions: Like the renegade exterminator in his poem 'The Termite Confessions, ' Max Garland allows his allegiances to stray to those mortal hungers that undermine the foundations of certainty. Out of such sympathies and a great gift for making poetry out of plain speech, a place and its history are given a voice and a visible soul. Unlike the lonely God of the Sistine Chapel in his last poem, Garland reaches across the space between our lives to touch us, and he succeeds. --Eleanor Wilner for Hunger Wide As Heaven: I'm a mad fan of the delicious, radiant poems of Max Garland. He even makes me feel closer to that old time religion than I've felt in quite a while. There's a welcoming world here you'll recognize, as well as a wistfulness that feels perfectly pitched, leaning out to mystery. You can string his poems together in your mind, drape them from the door inside your head like a welcoming wreath, and you'll feel better walking through it. - Naomi Shihab Nye Max Garland finds, in the 'knottiness/ of things'--wind, tree, bird, sky, water, lights, a father's milk truck, a mother's perfume--a music of resilience and grace. Simultaneously elegy and celebration, these poems explore themes of time and mortality, God and faith, memory and redemption, with a meditative serenity and urgency, in an affectionate accessible voice. For Garland, poetry is a way to speak a loss away, to embrace, in emptiness, strength; in diminishment, desire; in loss, recovery; in hunger wide as heaven, the possibility, at least, of fulfillment. This is a beautiful, beautiful book. --Ronald Wallace for The Word We Used For It: Somewhere between the joyous ecstasies of Rumi and the sweet and sometimes doleful observations of Whitman, there's a spot on the continuum of poetry where Max Garland sits and says his luscious, witty, remarkable poems. He gives us the it at the heart of existence, which for all but the finest of artists is all-too-often-unreachable. --Robert Wrigley Each poem is a gift of seeing, a gift of reflection, a mirror for the holy. We, as readers, get to taste what language can do when it melts into our tongues, flavors our lives. --Kao Kalia Yang Max Garland's long-limbed, resonant poems move with an understated grace that belies their tensile strength. They beg to be read aloud. Accessible, finely intelligent, laced with good humor, his third and best collection yet moves unerringly on 'the edge of joy/where it sharpens itself for the work it has to do.' --David Graham

for The Postal Confessions: Like the renegade exterminator in his poem 'The Termite Confessions, ' Max Garland allows his allegiances to stray to those mortal hungers that undermine the foundations of certainty. Out of such sympathies and a great gift for making poetry out of plain speech, a place and its history are given a voice and a visible soul. Unlike the lonely God of the Sistine Chapel in his last poem, Garland reaches across the space between our lives to touch us, and he succeeds. --Eleanor Wilner for Hunger Wide As Heaven: I'm a mad fan of the delicious, radiant poems of Max Garland. He even makes me feel closer to that old time religion than I've felt in quite a while. There's a welcoming world here you'll recognize, as well as a wistfulness that feels perfectly pitched, leaning out to mystery. You can string his poems together in your mind, drape them from the door inside your head like a welcoming wreath, and you'll feel better walking through it. - Naomi Shihab Nye Max Garland finds, in the 'knottiness/ of things'--wind, tree, bird, sky, water, lights, a father's milk truck, a mother's perfume--a music of resilience and grace. Simultaneously elegy and celebration, these poems explore themes of time and mortality, God and faith, memory and redemption, with a meditative serenity and urgency, in an affectionate accessible voice. For Garland, poetry is a way to speak a loss away, to embrace, in emptiness, strength; in diminishment, desire; in loss, recovery; in hunger wide as heaven, the possibility, at least, of fulfillment. This is a beautiful, beautiful book. --Ronald Wallace for The Word We Used For It: Somewhere between the joyous ecstasies of Rumi and the sweet and sometimes doleful observations of Whitman, there's a spot on the continuum of poetry where Max Garland sits and says his luscious, witty, remarkable poems. He gives us the it at the heart of existence, which for all but the finest of artists is all-too-often-unreachable. --Robert Wrigley Each poem is a gift of seeing, a gift of reflection, a mirror for the holy. We, as readers, get to taste what language can do when it melts into our tongues, flavors our lives. --Kao Kalia Yang Max Garland's long-limbed, resonant poems move with an understated grace that belies their tensile strength. They beg to be read aloud. Accessible, finely intelligent, laced with good humor, his third and best collection yet moves unerringly on 'the edge of joy/where it sharpens itself for the work it has to do.' --David Graham

Author Information

Max Garland's previous award winning books include The Word We Used for It, The Postal Confessions, and Hunger Wide as Heaven. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Michener Foundation, the Bush Foundation, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories, among many other awards. Born and raised in western Kentucky, where he worked for many years as a rural letter carrier on the route where he was born, he later attended the Iowa Writer's Workshop. He is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and is a former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin. He lives in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

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