Surface of the Lit World

Shane Seely is an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. He is the author of The Snowbound House, winner of the 2008 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry, and the chapbook History Here Requires Balboa.

"Here are more wonderful poems by Shane Seely, quietly readable, various, lush with imagery, hammered clean by the mind and spoken from the heart. Inspired by art and myth, poetry and music, the oldest stories told again for us here, now. These are poems of fathers and sons, daily touched by life, awakened new each morning by the clamoring world." "This is verse for the hearth and the backpack, poems that never fail to notice in the smallest moment something that might astonish." (Limestone Journal) "With an impressive combination of intelligence and heart, Shane Seely's poems '[glow] like a candled egg in the single window / of our cell.' This collection handily negotiates a fine line between the complex beauty of Paradise and the dark turns of hearts and bodies scorched from desire. These poems make me grateful for the sensitivity of Seely's ear and eye to record so many small graces on this planet." "'So much goes overgrown / if not attended to,' Shane Seely writes. But this fine book presents poem after poem of clear attention, to the daily world of home and garden and the timeless one of art's inheritance. There's wildness here—cougars or foxes we just barely glimpse along the perimeters of our lives, as well as what we see if we look inward. Light and shadow, love and fear. These are elegant, intelligent poems; as patient as paintings, as enduring as myths." "Shane Seely is a first-rate poet, delighted by language, alert and tender to the shocks of awe. Because he trusts his reader to think and feel as keenly as he does, he never puts on airs, and his new work is full of amazements. Some of my favorite moments are: the account of family man playing the part of the condemned in the rehearsal for an execution; the description of a member of the audience who leaves a lecture on Hart Crane cursing and saying that the speaker knows nothing about his subject; the description of an insect alighting on a book, this impeccably delivered in one of the old French verse forms; a drunken man's sudden discovery that the snow-covered field where has driven his pick-up is a frozen pond bursting open under him; and the story of a lock-picking orangutan and his companions in the Omaha Zoo. This book renews my faith in poetry as one of the great depths of pleasure."