Bluff - by Adam Chiles (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Bluff is a return to offer farewells - to father, homeland, childhood. A haunting elegy crafted out of the tangible world, these poems approach the precipice and turn the reader back towards life with the senses alight. Chiles is a lyric poet of subtle, mysterious gifts.

-Dan O'Brien

"We were nearing the end of something / though it was morning, the day young," so begins Adam Chiles' clear-eyed elegy for his dying father. His grieving involves a return to his native Yorkshire: cottages on eroding bluffs, dark shore, stiff winds, rain against glass, and the ever-present sea. There's a remarkable sense of inevitability to the forces he conjures. These lyrics sing to us of loss and change and continuity. They sting and soothe, sometimes all at once, as when Chiles reads Edward Thomas aloud to his father, "all afternoon, I give back / willow herb and grass" or when he sits in his father's art studio, taking consolation in "his oils, his resins."

- Catherine Staples

Review Quotes

From the zone of loss - of parents' slipping away, in a distant country, into death and assisted living, of the alloyed grief of the expatriate, of mortal flesh - Adam Chiles sends back incisive and yet gentle missives verging on but never ratifying despair. At bottom, though, these poems are about fundamental questions of identity, of the true name of consciousness. The expatriate says, "I wake one morning, / between selves, neither here / nor there." Who stands at the edge of the bluff? And who is bluffing? Bluff does not answer these questions. It sings them with a decorous beauty.

- T.R. Hummer

If poetry can turn the experience of our lives into something mythic, transform the private secular to the shared sacred, then Adam Chiles' Bluff is that work of poetry. In these poems, Bluff is both vantage point and authentic vulnerability, a rendering of soul-defining relationships that is unflinching in its ability to both record and be changed by what is there. Wondrous is the immensity of heart here that understands that the privileged position of the witness is also permeable no matter the distance. What an honor to be invited into this space where Chiles' fine ear and delicate line is given over to such vulnerability and tender openness, bringing us back to the origin making moments of life well-reckoned.

- James Hoch

In this lyrical collection of elegies, Adam Chiles renders the grief of losing loved ones and one's natal landscape in contrapuntal harmony with a landscape that, through the skillful use of metaphor, appears to us vital and bristling with energy: "The sea drills closer, you can smell it - / these architectures of salt, these lashed abbreviations / tossing in land. Feel the northern cottages / flinch and stiffen under the gale." Here, the lost landscape becomes ever more critical to the poet's sense of place and self. As William Faulkner notes, however, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." This book offers us the great pleasure of savoring the creative contradictions in these lively poems of ghosts, exile, homesickness, and erosion whose present and presences are as alive as they ever were.

- Sidney Wade