A garden in Kentucky
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About This Book
In this collection Jane Gentry evokes, in images as haunting as the Kentucky landscape, a garden thriving with the flowers of memory, a physical world that reflects a realm of transcendence. Cosmic harmony reveals itself in the "ciphers" of roots and worms, in a piece of blue-willow china - "a blaze of balance, of wholeness" - that survives a fire in which a lonely, tormented cousin died.
Like John Donne and Elizabeth Bishop, Gentry finds beauty, grandeur, and the suggestion of immortality in the smallest, most evanescent of details. A mother's clothes. Scents. Textures. The play of moonlight on rock. The chirp of crickets. A faded tintype of a great-grandfather's dog. The wedding of a drum majorette. A glimpse caught through an open door of a naked woman ironing. A scarecrow. The smell of Bible leather. Laundry drying on a clothesline.
Stark, lovely, elegiac, gently surreal, Gentry's poems resonate and echo in the vast spaces of the heart. A Garden in Kentucky is a place of mystery, terror, beauty, and wonder, a garden to which readers will find themselves returning again and again.
Like John Donne and Elizabeth Bishop, Gentry finds beauty, grandeur, and the suggestion of immortality in the smallest, most evanescent of details. A mother's clothes. Scents. Textures. The play of moonlight on rock. The chirp of crickets. A faded tintype of a great-grandfather's dog. The wedding of a drum majorette. A glimpse caught through an open door of a naked woman ironing. A scarecrow. The smell of Bible leather. Laundry drying on a clothesline.
Stark, lovely, elegiac, gently surreal, Gentry's poems resonate and echo in the vast spaces of the heart. A Garden in Kentucky is a place of mystery, terror, beauty, and wonder, a garden to which readers will find themselves returning again and again.
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