For the Mountain Laurel: Poems

by John Casteen

Overview

In his second collection, Casteen moves inward from the physical labor and vernacular culture that shaped his first book, Free Union, yet continues to focus on landscape and human relationships. With poems arranged in the order in which they were completed (which in large part reflects the order in which they were first written), Casteen presents a poetic record of the experiences of solitude, marriage, fatherhood, loss, and recovery. The Carolina chickadee can be heard in this work, but so can Emmylou Harris singing with Gram Parsons; these poems dwell in the music of language, the hard truths of those who are no longer young, and the pleasures of the reflective life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820337999
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	04/01/2011
Series:	The VQR Poetry Series
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

JOHN CASTEEN teaches at Sweet Briar College. He lives in Earlysville, Virginia. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, his poems have appeared in Ploughshares, the Georgia Review, the Iowa Review, Shenandoah, and other journals. He has contributed prose to Slate, VQR, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

JOHN CASTEEN teaches at Sweet Briar College. He lives in Earlysville, Virginia. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, his poems have appeared in Ploughshares, the Georgia Review, the Iowa Review, Shenandoah, and other journals. He has contributed prose to Slate, VQR, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Invocation
Late at Night, on the Maine Coast, News of the Lebanon War Arrives
Nocturne: Redaction
At Last Light
Innocent
By Design
Generation X
O Sea: That Is to Say:
How to Dig a Grave
Spring Ephemerals
Cold Snap
If Wishes Was Money
For the Mountain Laurel
About Non Sequitur
That's Why They Call It Hunting
Bird-Teasing after the Hurricane
Love Letter
Still Life with Roof Prism
Still Life with Telecaster
Still Life with "Sweet Georgia Brown"
Self-Portrait as a Younger Man, Pissed Off in the Shop
Self-Portrait in Response to a Rhetorical Question
Further Affiant Sayeth Naught
Three A.M., Walking the Dry Creek
A Master Narrative of the Inner Life
Below Quintana Peak
My Time among the Swells
On a Gravel Bar in the Rappahannock, I Misremember Herodotus
Losing My Ring
Riverine
Au Revoir, Teaberry
From the Evening Chair
Midwinter Elegy
Into Every Life
Aubergine
Generation X (Continued)
Meditation over Prairie
Desire Lines
Cipher [Cole Mountain, mid-April]
Self-Portrait: Tabula Rasa
Coda
Notes on the Poems

Editorial Reviews

Much of the pleasure of this collection lies in how it reintroduces the reader to the outside. Casteen unlocks the natural world with perfect, precise phrases.

Charlottesville News and Arts

"Much of the pleasure of this collection lies in how it reintroduces the reader to the outside. Casteen unlocks the natural world with perfect, precise phrases."—Charlottesville News and Arts

From the Publisher