seasons at the Patch - Kerry Shawn Keys

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Résumé :
The collection is big in breadth, big in length, big in scope; it's also big in heart and soul, big in humor and wisdom. Reading these dazzling poems, you'll hear echoes from near and far, from the distant past, the relatively recent past, and the present. The great and vaunted poets of the West show up from time to time in these pages as references, allusions, influences, sometimes as visiting characters, even as friends of the poet. Likewise, the literatures of the East make frequent allusive appearances: from the canon of the Indian subcontinent to-especially-the old Chinese poets Li Bo, Du Fu, and Han Shan (Cold Mountain). With phrasing like this, Kerry Shawn Keys establishes himself as one of the finest lyrical poets of our era: all is forgotten, and I am left at a loss, except for the crystal clear Big Dipper which over and over again, leisurely and benevolently quenches my unquenchable thirst.

Biographie:
Kerry Shawn Keys' work ranges from under-mountain vagrant-pastoral and urban-salvage to theater-dance pieces to flamenco lyrics to children's books to meditations on the Tao Te Ching to a polyphonic epic poem composed from his South India journals. He is the author of dozens of books, most recent among them Pienas (prose tales and plays), 2013; New Poems from China, 1917-2017, co-translated with Ming Di, 2019; Black Ice (poems), 2020; Shoelaces for Chagall, Love Poems (bilingual German/ English), 2021; and Alphabet of Dreams, (bilingual Lithuanian/English, poems), 2023. Keys received the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. He was a Senior Fulbright Research grantee for African-Brazilian studies in Salvador, Brazil, and from 1998 to 2000 taught translation theory and creative composition as a Fulbright Associate Professor at Vilnius University.