Description
Praise for The News Inside
Described by Mark Jarman as “the most humane of poets,” Brown combines a gentle sensibility with acute awareness of the world around him. Whether he turns his attention to the beauty of a Tennessee summer morning or to the homeless denizens of downtown Nashville, he writes from an unfailing sympathy, a core belief in the ineluctable connectedness of all life. His new book, The News Inside, explores the themes that have marked much of his previous work: his rural boyhood, the richness of married love, and, above all, the parallel cycles of the natural world and individual human lives. Aging and mortality loom large in these poems, which deal with everything from hip surgery to a child’s attachment to a dead bat—subjects that, in Brown’s hands, are both funny and tender.
(…) I think of the bat asleep
in the steeple that pointed toward heaven,
when all along paradise was flying in darkness
over the Forked Deer River, a gut full
of mosquitoes, a gift of summer rain
—From The Bard of Hume-Fogg, by Maria Browning (August 26, 2010) Chapter 16, Humanities Tennessee.
