Service
by Grant Souders
$19.95
“Souders risks that most dismissible of poetic virtues: sincerity. . . . Such sincerity reveals itself as a terrain, a ground, a place of founding and so also a place of finding. It makes of Souders’s poems something akin to ‘a fire to look at / and look by.’ The object of our meditation is also the object that gives us vision — the poem, these poems, which do not play for us a tune, but give us ‘a tune we could play into.’” — Dan Beachy-Quick, in a Boston Review “Poet’s Sampler”
Format: paperback
Out of stock
“[T]there is a materiality to language, but language is also not just pieces of furniture in a room. Words carry with them meaning, and that is a huge burden that language carries and what makes it different from other forms of art. Like, you know, G Sharp does not have a meaning. You might associate an emotion with the sound of it, but it doesn’t have meaning.” — from “In Service of Sincerity: An Interview with Grant Souders”, Virginia McClure, Blog / Los Angeles Review of Books
July Open Reading Period selection
How do we see the things that show us the other things we are among? The poems of Grant Souders’s first book are a conjuring. Service is born in utterance, with an opening eye, with the bareness that is there: the root of being in the word is. There’s an implication of narrative arc in the poet’s semblance of creation myth, beginning in nakedness and ending in everything. Here is a book that finds itself by leaving this world and reaching for the cosmos, if only to look back.
“Souders risks that most dismissible of poetic virtues: sincerity. . . . Such sincerity reveals itself as a terrain, a ground, a place of founding and so also a place of finding. It makes of Souders’s poems something akin to ‘a fire to look at / and look by.’ The object of our meditation is also the object that gives us vision — the poem, these poems, which do not play for us a tune, but give us ‘a tune we could play into.’” — Dan Beachy-Quick, in a Boston Review “Poet’s Sampler”
Additional information
| Weight | .4 lbs |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 6 × .5 × 9 in |
from Creek
If when you go to Pickett Creek,
and having gone there you think back on it.
Or back in it,
That water, there, flecked with light
and the memory of it.
You hold things.
The water flecked
flocks of sunlight
in the way they hold
each other.
