The Many Woods of Grief: Poems

Back Cover

T h e M an y Wo o d s Gr ie f UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS PRESS Amherst and Boston www.umass.edu/umpress In this striking debut volume, Lucas Farrell offers a lyrical and illuminating field guide to the flora and fauna of “worlds just out of reach.” With the precision and detail of an Audubon sketch, he turns his naturalist’s eye to the vast landscape of human emotion— all the while affirming “how real this world we live in / must be to live in.” “The Many Woods of Grief, if I saw it on a hand lettered sign at the end of a dirt road, I would pause a while before impulsively and maybe recklessly entering those woods. It’s not really like that in Lucas Farrell’s book. One feels one is accompanied by a steady, generous and practical guide who points out what to linger over and what to leave behind. Poem after poem opens up, newly imagined, freshly encountered. When Farrell writes things such as: ‘I think we make the scarecrows insecure,’ I think he makes me love his poems more and more. Farrell’s fearless and friendly, a fantastic combination.”—Dara Wier “‘The bird fell from the sky. / Let me be clear: The bird.’ We can see everything in these lines, in this book: a recombinant poetics, the literal re-marked as literal, a hunger for clarity, the imperative as plea. Not everything. ‘Compose again. Hope tectonics.’ Yes, everything.”—Christian Hawkey “Where else but in a poem can the radical experiment of transcendentalism— where the distances between I and you and I and it confound and grow intimate—be reclaimedbygrowingironic?Farrell’spoemsareofthatdeepironyinwhichtheselfis reintroducedtotheworldandtheworldshattersit.Theresultnearsakindofreligious awakening, save this religion isn’t dogma. It’s the eye returning to the ceremony of sight, the voice to the ceremony of singing, and the self to the ceremony of being in the glorious, ridiculous, difficult world.”—Dan Beachy-Quick Lucas farreLL received his MFA in poetry from the University of Montana. His writing has appeared in Boston Review, Jubilat, Cannibal, Alice Blue, Handsome, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. He coedits the online magazine Slope and lives in Townshend,Vermont. WINNER OF THE JUNIPER PRIZE FOR POETRY Cover art, design, and author photo by Louisa Conrad. ...