After the Rain

By Jared Carter

Book Overview

Jared Carter's second collection of poems, winner of the 1995 Poet's Prize. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1880834030
• ISBN13: 9781880834039
• Release Date: March 1993
• Publisher: Cleveland State University Poetry Center
• Length: 98 Pages

Customer Reviews

One of the best poetry books of the 1990s

I have at least a thousand poetry books in my study, many of which were sent for review by ambitious poetasters of various levels. But I reserve a special shelf next to my desk for treasured tomes, those to which I like to return to bear the burden of time, and for lofty entertainment. All are written by master poets. Next to a first edition of a tome by the much maligned and forgotten Madison Cawein, I keep a copy of "After the Rain," a collection that won Mr Carter the 1995 Poets' Prize. After the Rain After the rain, it's time to walk the field again, near where the river bends. Each year I come to look for what this place will yield- lost things still rising here. The farmer's plow turns over, without fail, a crop of arrowheads, but where or why they fall is hard to say. They seem, like hail, dropped from an empty sky, yet for an hour or two, after the rain has washed away the dusty afterbirth of their return, a few will show up plain on the reopened earth. Still, even these are hard to see- at first they look like any other stone. The trick to finding them is not to be too sure about what's known; conviction's liable to say straight off this one's a leaf, or that one's merely clay, and miss the point: after the rain, soft furrows show one way across the field, but what is hidden here requires a different view- the glance of one not looking straight ahead, who in the clear light of the morning sun simply keeps wandering across the rows, letting his own perspective change. After the rain, perhaps, something will show, glittering and strange. As we can see and hear Mr Carter is a craftsman of the highest order. The quoted poem begins this collection like a tour de force. What follows are poems metered and unmetered, rhymed and unrhymed, lyrics and narratives that take us by the hand like a guiding light, a light that stays with us long after his pages have been laid away.