Road Scatter

by Sandra Meek

Overview

Kinetic poems of dying and living from the author of Biogeography.

Road Scatter (as in tire-sprayed gravel) is an examination of breakage and survival, compelled by the decline and death of the poet’s mother but engaged, too, by global encounters with the Iraq war, a rabid dog in Africa, and an at-large South American former dictator, for example. Though a book of mourning, it is also one of living, “rising from grief, returning light in all directions.” —Jane Hirshfield

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780892554195
Publisher:	Persea Books
Publication date:	09/25/2012
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Sandra Meek is the author of five previous books of poetry, most recently An Ecology of Elsewhere, which earned her the 2017 Georgia Author of the Year and the 2017 Peace Corps Writers Award in the poetry categories. She is also the editor of an anthology, Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad. Meek is Dana Professor of English, Rhetoric and Writing at Berry College.

Editorial Reviews

...Sandra Meek's devastating new book of poetry, aches with a sense of loss that is not only personal (the collection is dedicated to her mother), but historical and global. This collection illuminates the fragility of our constructions—lives, buildings, societies—and their vulnerability to illness, folly, and the ravages of the natural world. ... startling collection.
”

Center for Literary Publishing

In her fourth collection, Meek presents dazzling, intricate poems about both the personal and the political. Many of the personal poems recall her parents' last days, and how difficult it was to watch them suffer. The political ones cover war and the destruction of a mosque. The images in the latter poems are so beautiful that they provide a strong counterpoint to the horror she describes, "secondaries/ only in breakage, scattered tesserae of glass/ and tile—amethyst, peach, emerald what remains/ of geometry…" Unlike many of the others, the poem "Air Hunger" is very spare so it fits its topic well—"the body's last music." While presenting the natural world, Meek's language often darts to an emotional truth or a philosophical consideration. In some poems, because of the lushness of the language and cascading images (all deftly crafted), the reader can get lost in the poem and wonder where it's heading. Consider these lines from "Urban Warfare as Design": "like bits of gold leaf/ like jettisoned ant wings, minute insects born/ into flight in summer streetlamps' shining umbrellas…" VERDICT Meek's poems are accomplished and interesting but not facile. Occasional poems are dense, but the collection as a whole is uplifting. For readers interested in poems that pinpoint the essential, that which makes us human, as in these lines from her first poem, "The body is a jar of air and lace;/ the heart, a ruby beaker, a hummingbird sips/ all summer from."—Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN

Library Journal

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