Description: Just as an orchard grower, when harvesting its fruit, discards the tart, the bitter, the overripe, and the stunted, so, too, any poet tries to judiciously rejected less-than-sterling poems when assembling his Selected. Pastoral Habits is a Selected of carefully chosen poems from fifty years and five volumes of poetic harvests. If "pastoral" connotes good shepherding, or good harvesting, then George Drew's collection with, like various varieties of fruit, includes poems about Michelangelo, Physics, Russia, all things American and the natural world, will resonate for those who value the worlds of poetry, from lyric to dramatic to narrative, and whether as background or central, the pastoral.
"Few books of poetry as good as Pastoral Habits will come out this year, perhaps none better."--X. J. Kennedy THE PIETÀMother, have you looked on this masterpiece?
Seen how you hold me as you did when I
was but a child? Here joy has been
exiled, and sorrow set upon the throne.
You will not see it on your perfect brow
draped by its kerchief. Nor on your firm chin,
nor in your inward-looking marble eyes,
nor even in my horror-riddled shape
draped like a smock across your lap.
Now do you see it? There--in your left hand:
the fingers splayed like broken wings,
the deeply chiseled lifeline, and the blood,
or shadow, smudging palm and fingertips.
Here, mother, piety and pity are the same.
Review Quotes: "I became interested in George Drew's poetry from reading two of his books, The Horse's Name was Physics and Down & Dirty. The first imagines the internal lives of those who worked on the Manhattan Project, and the second is styled as the outbursts of a literary redneck in which his fierce insistence on candor, reality, and memory refresh us, wake us up. One could hardly choose two mor different approaches, but George Drew connects them. He hasn't lost anything. These are strong and sinewy poems. What ties together these two books I mentioned, and what enlightens Pastoral Habits as well, is storytelling. Drew's one of the few recent American masters capable of the dramatic monologue. And you can read his poems and understand them. Plus, the music is as strong and sure and lively as the best kind of speech, raw with insight, energy, emotion, but not muddied or muddled, not vainly struggling toward yet another enjambment between a preposition and its object. The poems have real lines, recognizable, chewy lines. The music is made as if by the speaking voice, and that, in my opinion, is the exact secret of truly musical poetry."
--Jack Butler