Paperback: 84 pages
Meadowlark, May 2018
ISBN-13: 978-1732241008
ISBN-10: 1732241007
Retail Price: $15.00
We encourage readers to order our books through their favorite independent bookstore,
Intimate and lovely, the poems of
Tyler Robert Sheldon allow us to appreciate the small, overlooked wonders of
our familiar worlds. In Sheldon’s poems, there’s great compassion for people, for
landscapes, for family members, and for an unromanticized past. In this poet’s
work, it’s the little things that count—moments of conversation, kitchen
windows, the flights of native birds, the “sea ghosts” of Kansas. [Sheldon]
writes frequently of an overlooked Midwestern state—Kansas—and a storied
Southern one—Louisiana—with an exacting eye for detail and a sense of earned
wonder. In Driving Together, we
encounter a poetic voice that will take us into the heart of each destination,
and it’s a joy to hear this voice unwind in these fine and succinct poems.
~ Allison Joseph, author of Confessions of a Barefaced Woman
Tyler Sheldon performs a young
poet’s affection for formative experience recollected in early manhood,
seasoned with a mischievous whimsy.
~ Steven Hind, author of The Loose Change of Wonder
Not many poets can bridge the wild
terrain between lemons, ghosts of an inland sea, semiotics, a hurricane, and a
coyote howling in the Flint Hills of Kansas, but Tyler Sheldon, in his first
full-length collection of poetry, speaks directly and distinctly to the
everyday realities and deep-night mysteries of life. Driving Together invites
the reader to climb on for a ride across vistas of land and language, picking
up speed by reading the omens along the way, and slowing down just in time to
arrive at new understandings of home and adventure. His writing is clear-eyed
and precise while embracing a wide vista of time and place. As he writes in
"Elegy," "This poem believes / in extinction, knows / blades and
grass keep / secrets just like us." Come drive together with Sheldon to
find the more expansive view of our lives made visible in the quiet and
original heart of these poems.
~ Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, 2009-2013
Kansas Poet Laureate, author of Everyday Magic: Field Notes on the
Mundane and Miraculous
Tyler
Robert Sheldon’s Driving Together excavates a family history and maps
its place in Kansas with a storyteller’s mind and a poet’s precision. These
poem’s honor Sheldon’s identical twin brother who died after a “small handful
of hours,” and give a language for the spaces we make for the lives that were
too short: “I see you behind my eyelids, and touch / you as I pluck a leaf from
concrete.” Sheldon writes to illuminate how loss defines a place—“Our best
scenery / is not on the ground”—and in doing so, preserves what is fleeting.
~ Ruth
Awad, author of Set to Music a Wildfire
Driving Together by Tyler Robert Sheldon is a dynamic
book of verse that celebrates life through love: fraternal love, romantic love,
love for mindfulness, love for nature, love for writing. In its lines,
the poet confesses his greatest fears, but they are released along with the
breath the reader exhales when each syllable is pronounced; likewise, it is
there where the poetic voice and the reader intersect in a journey of words
that can be read peacefully time after time: “…The record will spin like the
passing world…We’ll listen again—as many times as we need." In these
pages, the poet holds an inner dialogue with himself, guiding the reader
through the poetic voice’s rite of passage. With each verse, Sheldon's voice
matures, reaching a catharsis in the end. The present moment is full of
creative energy through which the poet continues his life journey, "his
ears alert, his eyes full of wind and moon." This is a book I will
read again and again.
~Xánath Caraza, Writer-in-Residence,
Westchester Community College, New York
No comments:
Post a Comment