As When, in Season

by Jim Schley

Poetry. Jim Schley's first full-length collection of poems is made of sequences that turn upon phases of living--traveler, apprentice, homesteader and new parent, then troubled but still engaged... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1934851000
• ISBN13: 9781934851005
• Release Date: May 2008
• Publisher: Marick Press
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.29 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.2" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

songs and odes

Don't expect to drop in for a casual read here; this book wants more from you, and will reward your concentration. Just when you think you've grown accustomed to a tone of serious contemplation, a surprising switch of language, thought, or construction jabs you in the ribs. These poems are broad, deep and dense at the same time as they are accessible and at the same time as they make you think and experience beyond where you previously had gone. Isn't this what we want from our poetry? Grounded in the image, the concrete detail ("aisle lights / glinting like valves / down the length / of a black clarinet") and expanding the world through syntactical twists, metaphor and simile ("breath [of song]... / spins curving in a glide that frees from // slinging gravity these syllables, to tease on / invisible ropes, cords, and trapezes / the air around us, vaulting the notes / from your lips like acrobats"), Jim Schley's poems lift us into the farthest reaches of what life is all about.