From the Meadow - (Pitt Poetry) by Peter Everwine (Paperback)

About the Book

Peter Everwine has been a dominant force in American poetry for more than five decades. This volume features a group of new works, as well as selections from four previous collections, which capture the quiet intensity of his calmly dazzling work.

Book Synopsis

For nearly five decades, readers have been enthralled and enchanted by Peter Everwine's calmly dazzling poems. He's never been a writer clearly aligned with any single school or style, yet adherents of all schools and styles admire his graceful turns of phrase and intense vision. From the Meadow features selections from four previous collections, along with a group of new works. The poems, which include Everwine's deft translations from Hebrew and interpretations from Nahuatl, vibrate with the intensity of small truths distilled to their very essences.

Review Quotes

A rich, international tour de force. . . nearly flawless in its technical aspects.-- "(Easton, PA) Express-Times"

A welcome event . . . should bring renewed attention to his work.-- "Georgia Review"

Everwine's ear for every line's precise weight--his gift for simple beauty--makes his work a pleasure . . . He is a poet who listens for language and for the silence that surrounds it, who examines the space it fills both outside us and within.-- "The Antioch Review"

He presents us with poetry in which each moment is recorded, laid bare, and sanctified, which is to say the poems posses a quality one finds only in the greatest poetry.-- "Ploughshares"

His poems are timeless, lyrical songs that transcent the dark forces of our society and call for a deeper understanding of our values. Becoming familiar again with old poems by a gifted master is like reliving the days when poetry truly came from the heart to ravish and define who we are.-- "Bloomsbury Review"

Peter Everwine's lyrics and translations--for they all seem part of a single voice--haunt me with their clear, crisp, unsentimental, heartbreaking lines. . . . Unassuming, hard and unswerving as fate itself.-- "Paul Mariani"

There is a profound humility in Everwine's poems, a tenderness for the least detail in the world, which his attention and care make luminous. Bone, leaf, panorama, or part of speech, Everwine works to identify in any particular how our lives--at least in the attention of the moment--might claim transcendence.-- "Christopher Buckley"

There is something shining and pure--a radiant clarity, a luminous stillness--at the heart of Peter Everwine's beautiful, mysterious, and necessary work.-- "Edward Hirsch"

These exquisite poems are so well paced that nothing ever seems forced or misplaced.-- "Library Journal"

What a radiant book--a lifetime of Peter Everwine's quiet, meditative poems, and his shining translations, made (or found) his own.-- "Jean Valentine"

About the Author

Peter Everwine is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Collecting the Animals, which won the Lamont Poetry Prize (now the James Laughlin Award). He retired from California State University, Fresno, in 1992.