Open Field, Understory

Download or read book Open Field, Understory written by James L. Seay and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This superb collection of new and older work shows James Seay's sure progress from the reflection of first influences to the strongly individual voice of his later pieces. As always, Seay evokes a profound sense of history and place - the landscape, colors, scents, and musical vocal cadences of his native South and the world at large. Yet, though the compulsion to "tell stories, when the truth won't work" may be our downfall, Seay shows us that stories are also prisms refracting each seemingly simple moment into infinite complexity. The stories in these beautifully wrought poems offer us swift glimpses of grace - when the fragmentary individual memory flares, is transformed, and becomes the story we have all been waiting for, the one that "frees the body from the fact of itself".