Description: Alternately startling and heart-wrenching, The New and Collected Poems of Jane Gentry offers a valuable retrospective of the celebrated poet's work.
Brief description: Jane Gentry (1941-2014)was the author of two collections of poetry, a chapbook, and numerous critical essays and book reviews. During her forty-year tenure as professor of English at the University of Kentucky, Gentry served as a mentor to generations of young writers and worked tirelessly to promote new voices. Her awards and honors include two Al Smith Fellowships from the Kentucky Arts Council and residency fellowships from Yaddo and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. In 2013, she was inducted into the UK College of Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame. A native of central Kentucky, she served as the state's poet laureate from 2007 to 2008.
Review Quotes:
Poetry is obliged to prove again and again that beauty may arrive from moments that are not pretty, just as grief may lead us to discover profound love. These are truths I've always taken from Jane Gentry's poetry, and now, in this final collection of her work, one sees her long effort has been one of discovery and candor, to push through ordinary loss and the stinging shortness of life, in order to find the moments that endure or flash-out trying to endure. Here, without decoration or fanfare, is a gorgeous body of work wholly integrated to tell it like it is, without--and this is the heart-rending grace note--complaint. As Jane Gentry observes in one of the Late Poems in this collection, 'A poem is a bird that flies on many wings.' She's right about that, and here is a lovely book filled with many birds and their poignant flights. What a treasure this is.
--Maurice Manning, author of One Man's Dark and The Common Man, a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry