A Garden in Kentucky: Poems

By Jane Gentry

Book Overview

In this collection Jane Gentry evokes, in images as haunting as the Kentucky landscape, a garden thriving with the flowers of memory, a physical world that reflects a realm of transcendence. In this garden, cosmic harmony reveals itself in the "ciphers" of roots and worms, in a piece of blue willow china-"a blaze of balance, of wholeness"-that survives a fire in which a lonely, tormented neighbor died. The white sheets crack in the wind, fat bellies of sails sweet as round stomachs of children. Stark, lovely, elegiac, gently surreal, Gentry's poems resonate and echo in the vast spaces of the heart; long after being read, lines return, lines like those of the lovely "In the Moment of My Death (For My Father)" that beg to be memorized: In the moment of my death may your old happiness light my way; and the image of your face smiling, happy at my coming, be a lantern in the dark. The taste of desire, the pang of remembered loss, the sorrow of leaving a house-Jane Gentry has found a way to make these things new. A Garden in Kentucky is a place of mystery, terror, beauty, and wonder, a garden to which readers will find themselves retuning again and again.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807120030
• ISBN13: 9780807120033
• Release Date: August 1995
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Personal touches in Kentucky bluegrass

Former Kentucky Poet Laureate, Gentry writes of common Kentucky things as cicadas, fireflies, Kroger's, and bullfrogs, but adds a very personal touch. So there are personal poems about Aunt Lucy, "chastely dream a dark-eyed purple of her own.", and a Great-Grandfathers' Dog on Tintype. The most honest poems are about her father, "He wore weather like an old sweater, / nest to his skin.", and with that loss "If only I could empty myself / of you and your absence. / No. Then you would be lost / as if you had never been.".. The cemetery offers images "luminous as porcelain yellow pink" and a place to exercise. The most striking poem for me "In the Kroger: For Jim, His daughter dead in a wreck" "Today at the store I came upon you/ by the cereal shelf struck. / like a monument, so hard and real"