The Quarry: Poems

by Dan Lechay

Overview

Once or twice in a generation a poet comes along who captures the essential spirit of the American Midwest and gives name to the peculiar nature that persists there. Like James Wright, Robert Bly, Ted Kooser, and Jared Carter before him, Dan Lechay reshapes our imagination to include his distinct and profound vision of this undersung region.

The poetry of Dan Lechay, collected in The Quarry, constructs a myth of the Midwest that is at once embodied in the permanence of the landscape, the fleeting nature of the seasons, and the eternal flow of the river. Lechay writes of memory and the mutability of memory, of the change brought on a person by the years lived and lost, and of the stoic attempts made by those around him to elicit an order and rationale to their lives.

The Quarry is the first full-length collection from this seasoned poet. Final judge Alan Shapiro in writing about The Quarry said: “If Dan Lechay’s poems often begin with the ordinary details and circumstances of life in a small Midwestern town or city, they always end by reminding us that no moment of life is ever ordinary, that ‘Nothing is more mysterious than the way things are.’

The Quarry is a marvelous, disquieting, extraordinarily beautiful book that meditates on fundamental questions of time and change in and through a clear-eyed yet loving evocation of everyday existence. Under Lechay’s soulful gaze, the backyards, neighborhoods, animals, and landscapes he describes dramatize the often wrenching connection between beauty and loss, evanescence and memory. The Quarry is a thoroughly mature and accomplished book.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780821415344
Publisher:	Ohio University Press
Publication date:	02/23/2004
Series:	Hollis Summers Poetry Prize
Edition description:	1
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Dan Lechay has taught literature at the San Francisco Art Institute, the University of Iowa, and elsewhere. For ten years, he directed health and hospital investigations for the New York City Council president. His poems have appeared in many journals, including The Iowa Review, Southwest Review, and Agni.

Table of Contents

i.
	In Limelight	3
	Last Night	5
	River	6
	Black Lab	9
	In the Shallows	10
	South Siders	12
	Work	13
	Singing Head	15
	Oak Street Houses	18
	Little Dream	20
	Back to Nature	21
	Playground	23
	Reading the Iliad in Homer's Greek at the Cedar Valley Quarry	25
ii.
	Screen	31
	A Mouth	33
	Out-of-the-Way Places	34
	Notes on an Ancient Signary	35
	The Dead	37
	Porifera	38
	Ghost Villanelle	40
	Lively World	41
	Like a Cat	43
	World Full of Animals	44
	The Undead	46
	Quiet Evening; Cat; Then Rain	47
iii.
	Houses by the Sea	53
	Unpainted Portrait	54
	Code	56
	In Memory of Neil C.	57
	Mississippi Sunday Morning	59
	Quarry	60
	Crystal Trillions	63
	On Fire	64