Eon - (Southern Messenger Poets) by T R Hummer (Paperback)

About the Book

"LSU Press Paperback Original"--Title page verso.

Book Synopsis

A poetic study of the eternal, T. R. Hummer's new collection Eon, as with the other volumes in this trilogy--Ephemeron and Skandalon--offers meditations on the brief arc of our existence, death, and beyond. With vivid, corporeal imagery and metaphysical flourishes, the poet explores how the dead influence the ways we understand ourselves. Anchored with a series of poems that can be read as extended epitaphs, the collection closes with a gesture toward the redemptive power of love. In the tradition of Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily Dickinson, and Philip Levine, Eon shows us the power of being "simple expressions of our earth. It imagined us, / And was imagined by something nameless in return."

Review Quotes

Eon is haunted by death so alive and busy we need to be called back--by sex, by love, by the task at hand--from realms of ghosts to the world of the living. It begins with the broken and bereaved, moves through elegy, and brings us at last to the miracle of ordinary life and the beloved. Come along for the ride.--Robert Archambeau

Hummer's Eon shows he's a master not just of form, these painstaking precise enjambments, but of attention to the past, which is really a reluctance to say goodbye to the world. There's a construction of his subjects: murder, love, elegies for artists, writers, musicians, and family; but also the falling apart of these subjects. They're poems that push the finger into the wound, the transient nature of life and death, the thing about which we can know nothing. These poems tell me: we're here for now, maybe not for long, but the beauty in a poem that shows what a spirit is like can be here perhaps forever.--Sean Singer

About the Author

Born on a farm in rural Mississippi, T. R. Hummer is the author of fourteen books of poetry and essays. Former editor of the Georgia Review and the Kenyon Review, he is a Guggenheim fellow in poetry and has won numerous awards for his work.