The First Echo: Poems - Softcover

Shane Seely (Author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807169633 ISBN 13: 9780807169636

Publisher: LSU Press, 2019

Synopsis

The First Echo meditates on the comings and goings of midlife- births and deaths, losses and gains, despairs and hopes. In poems that range from rigorous formalism to breathless free verse, Shane Seely reaches for instruction, understanding, and comfort. He finds solace in works of art- including paintings, literature, and film- as well as in nature, human relationships, and memory. He suggests that, like the bat or the whale, we humans understand ourselves through echo, through the sounds we send out and the sounds that come back. That returning voice, like our own and yet not quite ours, reminds us that to be alone is to be with a self that is at once strange and familiar. Evocative and engaging, The First Echo offers poems on memory, illness, and grief- reflecting on the sadness and knowledge attached to each.

About this title

About the Author

Shane Seely is the author of two previous books of poetry, The Surface of the Lit World and The Snowbound House. He is associate professor of English at the University of Missouri- St. Louis, where he directs the MFA program in creative writing.

From the Back Cover

"I admire Shane Seely's locution in The First Echo, his syntactical pacing and subordination. His craft is grounded in the wranglings of the unraveling breathlessness and the surprising delays of a master storyteller who can lead us to the sublime coda 'that the world is just two voices / in the dark, cruelty and fear / and rain on the windshield, / the blind curve, the stranger / up ahead.' The tender and contemplative echoes from Seely's poems are the ones we seek in the most desperate, bewildering, and ecstatic moments of our lives, reminding us of how intermeshed all of these seemingly disparate moments genuinely are."--Adam Vines

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

It was only after,
in that after meant to be
life as we know it,
that he, walking behind her—
she was, and can’t we
understand this, angry
with him—called out
to her about the high cliff
they were approaching,
which appeared to mark
the end of the traversable
landscape, and a moment later
heard a voice return: someone
was calling, the voice distant
and fading, calling stop saying
please saying please come back.
—from “The First Echo”

Edition details

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807169633
• ISBN 13: 9780807169636
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 250