Told in the Seed and Selected Poems

by Sanora Babb, Carol Loranger (Introduction), Joanne Dearcopp (Editor)

Overview

Told in the Seed and Selected Poems offers poems from Sanora Babb's more than sixty years of writing and publishing poetry. This new collection adds many of her earliest poems to those of her later years that were in the original Told in the Seed. A new introduction by Carol S. Loranger notes that "Of all Sanora Babb's writings, it is the poetry, perhaps, that offers the most intimate and unvarnished picture of the woman and the artist." In the introduction Loranger weaves together relevant information about Babb's life with the more personal poems to further enhance the reader's appreciation.

Babb published her first poem at fourteen in the Forgan Eagle and continued to write and publish poetry from the 1920s to the early 1990s in a wide range of journals and publications. She won the Borestone Mountain Poetry Award in 1967 for "Told in the Seed" and the Gold Medal Award in 1932 for "Captive" from the Mitre Press Anthology, London.

Having a strong empathy with people and their daily lives, an affinity with all in the natural world, and the ability to elevate the ordinary into the extraordinary, Babb reflects all this in her poetry. Her poems quicken with lyricism, clarity, and a powerful sense of immediacy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780985991548
Publisher:	Muse Ink Press
Publication date:	08/16/2021
Pages:	148
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.34(d)

About the Author

Sanora Babb (1907-2005) is the author of nine books, as well as numerous essays, short stories, and poems that were published in literary magazines alongside the work of Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Ralph Ellison, Katherine Ann Porter, William Saroyan, and William Carlos Williams. She published her first poem at fourteen in the Forgan Eagle and continued to write and publish poetry all her life, winning the Borestone Mountain Poetry Award in 1967 for "Told in the Seed" and the Gold Medal Award in 1932 for "Captive" from the Mitre Press Anthology, London.

Carol S. Loranger, has taught American literature and culture at Wright State University. She has published on the poetry of Sanora Babb, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Robert Frost, and E.A. Robinson, and on the fiction of writers as diverse as Louisa May Alcott, Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Pynchon, and William S. Burroughs. A sometime poet, she has published poetry as Carol Schaechterle in Pebble, Mad River Review, Midwest Review, and Louisville Review.

Joanne Dearcopp is Sanora Babb's literary executor and publisher. She has worked at Simon & Schuster, McCall Books, and Grolier Publishing, and is co-editor of Unknown No More: Recovering Sanora Babb, published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Introduction

I.

Told in the Seed

Aristolochia

Lean Away from the Tree

Why Does the Dog Howl on the Midnight Hill?

Bird of Night

Allegro con Fuoco

II.

Old Snapshots I-IV

III.

Recognition's Glance

Wedding Song

Santa Cruz

Giant Sequoia

Critic

Above Malpaso Creek

Night Range of Lions

IV.

The Last Year

A Circling Wind

Before Sleep

Night Visit

Puzzle

V.

In a Field in Peloponesia

Night in a Greek Village

VI.

At Mama's Grave

Night

The Visitor

L'Immortelle

VII.

34th Parallel: January

Love Song I

Love Song II

The Verge

Love Song III

Summer Dark

Echo

Again

Silence

VIII.

Captive

Being

IX.

Miranda

X.

I Thought I Saw the Dawn Go By

The Restive Plains

Kansas Prairie

Rain

Fog

Today

I Had Forgotten

Measure

It Is the Way the Deep Lush Grass

This Is the Time and Place to Write a Poem, I Thought

XI.

To Some Visiting Birds From the North

Infidelity

Ullalulla

To Toby

Fire Cat

Birds in a Storm

Spiders

Amber

XII.

Coute Que Coute

For My Inquisitive Friends

Conquest

Poem

Unholy Grail

Search

Plea

For Future Reference

XIII.

One with the Braves

My Lost Name

Old Snapshot V

Divorce

XIV.

Reply

If I Had Been Less Cautious

To a New Lover

A Little Thing

I Wish I Could Remember

Vagrant Quest

After Grief

Lonely

Essence

Acknowledgements

Afterword

About the Author

About the Editors