Description: 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."
Brief description: 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 the former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin. He lives in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
Review Quotes:
for Into the Good World Again:
"'We gravitate toward water; from a sense of kinship," Max Garland's poem 'Bedrock' begins. Rivers, especially, lend these poems their current. People stand mid-bridge, in the here and now, staring upriver to learn what is coming, and downriver 'for what they thought was theirs to keep.' The "good world" is ever in motion, stilled only momentarily by these marvelous poems. Garland's grace-full meditations bring "the good world" back to us, his readers, too, despite the hardships of the pandemic, and the difficulties of loss. Marvelous imagery is everywhere, as here: dolphins "motion like sewing themselves in and out of the sea." These poems are deeply moving and nourishing. Garland speaks of a time 'before the holiness in things grew silent.' Yet his beautiful poems illustrate the opposite. Grace is right here in these pages, embedded in every line."--Connie Wanek, author of Rival Gardens: New and Selected Poems
"A new book from Max Garland is always a cause for celebration, and Into the Good World Again delivers all the pleasures that readers expect from this poet--vivid, evocative imagery, musical language, inventive metaphors, and original, striking observations. But these poems are also full of wisdom, something only poets of the first rank--of which Max Garland is one--provide. And the wisdom in this remarkable collection is hard-earned, deeply felt, and often profound."--Larry Watson, author of Montana 1948, Let Him Go, and other novels, and the poetry collection, Late Assignments