Begin Your Journey With Tennessee Landscape With Blighted Pine Produced By Jesse Graves In Electronic Format

much poetry of a certain place you can feel rural Tennessee in every poem, even when the poet is away from home and just pining for it.


Ha, pine. Unintentional pun.

My favorites were more focused on emotion than nature detail, such as:

Emissaries
"My hands keep their own remembrance
buried in fine grooves of flesh.
"

Time and the Motions Our Bodies Made
"We danced whether we believed in the lyrics
or not, because the rhythm turned us into ancient
ciphers, in control of time but surrendered in body

to ritual movement, it protected us from the specter
of parents, how our lives could evolve into theirs.
"

I want to be fair in my assessment of Blighted Pine as I am not a huge poetry fan.
I believe real poetry fans will find it likable and well written, Personally, if I'm going to read poetry I want to really be moved by it, Sadly, this collection did not move me, I was raised on a farm and understand getting down to my roots, but poems like Elegy for a Hay Rake do not inspire me.
So, a.from me and astar Goodreads rating, Wellwrought language paints a soothing pastoral meditation woven throughout this collection, One of the best poetry books I have read this year or ever, An authentic voice echoes through the Appalachian Mountains and settles deep within the valleys, Highly recommend! I enjoyed this collection of poetry, It's hard to review a book of poetry, so I'll just

say I enjoyed this collection, Jesse Graves love for the land and his family is in every line, Amazing book of poetry. A fine and mature collection, One of my favorite poets, I was introduced to the poetry of Jesse Graves when I attended a reading where he was paired with a novelist and another poet.
I was struck by the lyrical softness of his language, even though his poetry covered all the hard edges of Appalachia: the landscape, the fading architecture of farms, the people.
I wanted to buy his book that day, but alas, I was broke, so when I got home I ordered the collection,

Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine was worth the wait.
From its title, the book instantly suggests that Graves collection is going to be a work of Appalachian literature, and yes, many of the poems do evoke a strong sense of place.
The opening poem, "For the Frozen Wood" is a poem written in pantoum form, and with its repeating line scheme, the reader is drawn into a world that changes but somehow comes full circle.


Graves poems are littered with farms and backroads, ponds and forests, Many of his works contain a persona grappling with his place in a world where relationships are evolving and places are changing.
My favorite poem in the whole collection is "Digging the Pond" where a young boy watches his father: "He can name every species of tree, wild root/the compounds of the soil in every field/and knows that I stood off to the side too often/to learn what he was born knowing.
"

In many ways, this is a collection of journeys, Several poems contain the metaphor of travel through roadtrips, For instance, one poem "St, Paul" tells the story of a young boy traveling with a favorite uncle who spoke to his young nephew "like I might actually know something/which none of the other grownups did.
" Another poem, the almost bittersweet "Detroit Muscle" tells a narrative of a young man who works diligently on a car and then takes it for a spin: "I lost itthe front tire slipped the road and I went/spinning, one ditch swallowed me up and spit me straight/into the other and I landed upside down in a tobacco field/wondering where the road went and why I wasn't on it.
" While many of these poems stick close to the narrator's home, others wander elsewhere, sometimes traveling to the Finger Lakes region in New York state, sometimes traveling to Louisiana.


All in all, Graves' book is collections of human histories steeped in landscape, In his world you can read about young boys who kick up "devil's snuff" in the back woods of their homes and a fisherman who hopes for a bite from a fish who "wouldn't take a red worm/if it swam into their suctioncup mouths.
" In his world, you venture into the past through both tangible photographs and abstract memories, With other poems, you venture into a fast fading rural landscape that has scars of both family loss and strength.

I struggle with poetry, I need it to just be lovely and pretty direct and about something I know, I could tell this was lovely stuff but it floated by me without grabbing my soul, I might dive in again at a later date, This is southern poetry done right, As a southerner in grad school in the PNW, fellow Louisianaian Yusef Komunyakaa's Magic City was the only collection of poems that truly fed my homesickness.
Graves' now shoulders some of that load, Narrative without being too hemhawish, flooded with river and lake and hickory and oak and pine and fish and fallow and harvest and work and aboutother things that remind me of home, it's poetry concerned with the present and future, with decay and loss, and all of it informed by the past, informed by something unknowable hunkering in inherited bone and blood.
Jesse Graves was born and raised in Sharps Chapel, Tennessee, where his ancestors settled in thes,   His poems and essays have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Southern Quarterly, Connecticut , and other journals, anthologies, and collections.
He teaches at East Tennessee State University, where he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature and Language.
 
"I admire the assurance, the formal authority of Graves craft, "Robert Morgan

“Here is a welcome new voice offering strengths in craftsmanship and music, but always grounded in a profound sense of place.
Read these poems for their wisdom, listen closely to their cadence, let them take you where they will, ”Jeff Daniel Marion

“Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine is more than an extraordinary first book, These poems have the music, wisdom, and singular voice of a talent fully realized, and make abundantly clear that Jesse Graves is one of Americas finest young poets.
”Ron Rash sitelink post a comment,