Southern Messenger Poets
2 total works
Shift Work gathers a chorus from the storytelling working classes of the Upper South. In narrative poems made of sinewy, Whitmanesque lines, Bobby C. Rogers composes portraits of dwellers in the small towns, unincorporated communities, and hard-edged cities they have flown to, always packing their past with them, an inheritance as ephemeral as vapor, made mostly of memory even as it was being lived.
In Ghostlight, a long-awaited second collection of original poems by Ryan Wilson, considers the haunting of the contemporary mind. With virtuosic formal variety and masterful craft, these poems range from rural America to Italy to the Holy Land, as they chronicle the dynamism of a spiritual odyssey toward the eternal through both past and present. Wilson employs sonnets, Pindaric and ballad stanzas, alliterative hemistichs in imitation of the Anglo-Saxon, and other ancient forms to enlighten the modern experience, from smartphones and Facebook to jumbo jets, entangled in a reciprocal relationship with myths, sacred literature, and traditions.
Revealing that the past and the everlasting can inform the present at any given moment, In Ghostlight conveys how a vision acknowledging this dual illumination helps us understand ourselves and others in our fraught, complex era.
Revealing that the past and the everlasting can inform the present at any given moment, In Ghostlight conveys how a vision acknowledging this dual illumination helps us understand ourselves and others in our fraught, complex era.