Description: Everything Shapes Itself to the Sea is an account of an American couple's months on the Caribbean island of Barbados, whose people, bounties, and rhythms inspired these poems, many of which first appeared in leading literary magazines.
Brief description: James Plath is R. Forrest Colwell Chair and Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University, where he has taught since 1988. In a past life he edited the award-winning Clockwatch Review: a journal of the arts and directed the Hemingway Days Writers' Workshop & Conference in Key West. A published poet, fiction writer, and journalist, Plath was invited to lecture as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of the West Indies-Cave Hill Campus, in Barbados for a semester, and these poems grew out of that experience. His poetry was previously collected in Courbet, on the Rocks (White Eagle Coffee Store Press, 1994) and included in City of the Big Shoulders: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry and Men of Our Time: An Anthology of Male Poetry in Contemporary America. Also the author-editor of six scholarly books on Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, Ray Carver, and the film Casablanca, Plath is the happily married father of six and grandfather of seven.
Review Quotes:
Everything Shapes Itself to the Sea is a book that follows the sea, in the best sense of that old phrase. Intimate in its addresses, conscious of the rules and bare butts of colonizers, mindful as well of what shapes "the right music" might take, this recounting of an American couple's months in Barbados is a trove of fortunes noted. James Plath writes, "The sea is a healer, one man / told us . . ." and the book shows us in some detail that Plath's informant was correct. Everything Shapes Itself to the Sea--short but sweet as a snap of Mount Gay--is a delight.
C.S. Giscombe
"All anyone can do is hold however fragile / a shell against an ear, and listen." Every one of James Plath's poems is a threshold into a world full of startling juxtapositions. His work reveals a quality of attention that is deeply moving. Above all, these poems teach me how to listen--a rare gift, indeed. Joanne Diaz