Books – Sydney Lea

Such Dancing As We Can

Early on in Sydney Lea’s mother lode of trenchant reflections, Such Dancing As We Can, he speaks of “taking stock toward the end of a lucky life.” He does just that, and admirably well, but what moves me most is his irresistible tendency to take stock of the unlucky lives he has known. His book stands in the place where empathetic imagination and true compassion kiss, where mere sentimentality averts its eyes for shame. What William Carlos Williams once said about poetry could also be said of these essays by one of our finest living poets: “It is difficult to get the news” in these pages, or much news, but people “die miserably everyday for lack of what is found there.”

—Garret Keizer, Author of Getting Schooled and The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want

The Humble Essayist Press

Such Dancing As We Can

—Garret Keizer, Author of Getting Schooled and The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want

The Humble Essayist Press

What Shines

Retrospective of a long life and already inimitable career in poetry, Sydney Lea’s What Shines asserts and asks in equal measure. In older age, Lea affirms the luster of fruit long labored for: a resilient and happy marriage; the rewards of parenthood and, later, grandchildren; a profound intimacy with northern New England — the environment, the seasons, the people, home, time. But he also transmits the escalating urgency of answering the fundamental question: at this late hour, what light do we have to see by? What light will outlast us?

“The refrain of aging and death echoes throughout and is tempered by Lea’s gentle optimism and appreciation for every facet of life. These poems provide readers with a potent antidote to hopelessness.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Life isn’t easy, and we’re all scarred, traumatized to some degree. What is to be done? Lea responds in illuminating verse that expresses a reckoning with emotions that linger like ghosts in the bardo, hesitant to move on, having one more thing to say…This radiant collection will leave readers counting their blessings past, to come, and most certainly right here.”
—Booklist

Four Way Books • New York, NY

Seen From All Sides

Lyric in Everyday Life

This book is a compendium of newspaper columns on poetry, composed during Lea’s laureate tenure, in which the author seeks to show the relevance of lyric poetry to the ordinary life of any citizen.

“As the title suggests, these columns—deliberately plainspoken, resolutely egalitarian—look at poetry ‘from all sides.’ Lea’s anecdotes, musings on craft and composition and local vignettes ratify his point about the value of lyric to everyday life.”
—The Hudson Review

“. . . a rich array of meditations on everything from slam poetry to the collision course of Western imperialism with Islamic fundamentalism. The author has quite a few bones to pick with academic elitism in particular. Lea juggles such diverse subjects in a refreshingly readable style: Although his approach is rooted in erudition, you won’t find any dense literary jargon here. Instead, Lea illustrates his prose with a wealth of plainspoken wisdom garnered over the decades he’s spent living in rural Vermont. . . . it demonstrates the author’s profound dedication to poetry and to forging connections across borders both geographic and linguistic. Ultimately, Lea himself is “seen from all sides” in this volume: as the generous neighbor, the grouchy formalist, the Guggenheim Fellow who judges the local spelling bee and a true ambassador for the written word.”
—Seven Days

Green Writers Press • Brattleboro, VT

The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy

A collaborative with James Kochalka

This collaboration between two Vermont Laureates– one in poetry and one in cartooning– is very likely one of a kind. It is both whimsical and probing, wry and earnest. Though it mocks the format of epic poetry, it raises serious human issues: among many, the need (or is it the futility?) of persistence against long odds; the crucial but often heartbreaking nature of dear friendship; the appeal and the cruelty of the natural world; the allure, sometimes simultaneous, of despair and hope. The drawings bring the verse alive, and the poetry sheds light on the art.

In The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy, multi-award winning illustrator and graphic novelist James Kochalka brings us a thematic collection of drawings that chronicle the exploits of a worm who embarks on an adventure of rescue, fueled by inescapable surges of bravery. This odyssey is aptly and expertly versified into an ekphrastic epic by former Vermont Poet Laureate Sydney Lea. Readers of all ages will be entertained by the sights, tension, suspense, and humor of this unique collection.

“Lea’s plainspoken New England voice has benefited from its multi-genre development, making the poems here easy in diction, resistant to lyric flights and focused on making sense of things.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Like his mentor Frost, Lea vividly contextualizes . . . his beloved rural New England.”
—Library Journal

“[Lea’s] elegant book [is] rhythmically satisfying, with its jazz-like riffs . . . by a man at the top of his game.”
—Ploughshares

Word/Galaxy Press • Concord, California

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“Sydney Lea has always been a poet equally eloquent and wide-eyed before reality. This self-aware book of experience, stock-taking, and memory finds him just now, just here, a person still hopeful in the face of it all, a poet at the height of his powers.”
– Jane Hirshfield

“Life isn’t easy, and we’re all scarred, traumatized to some degree. What is to be done? Lea responds in illuminating verse that expresses a reckoning with emotions that linger like ghosts in the bardo, hesitant to move on, having one more thing to say...This radiant collection will leave readers counting their blessings past, to come, and most certainly right here.”
– Booklist

Four Way Books • New York, NY

Growing Old In Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives

A collaborative with Fleda Brown

Sydney Lea and Fleda Brown, past poets laureate of their respective states and both nationally recognized writers who’ve given their lives to their art, have conspired to write an unusual book of essays. They’ve picked a wide variety of topics and headed out as they wished with each, covering a lot of territory, both artistic and memoiristic. Some of the pieces, like “Wild Animals,” are downright silly; some, like “Sex,” “Music,” and “Food,” are provocative; some, like “Clothes,” “Sports,” and “Houses,” appear ordinary but are ultimately revealing. The final essay offers, from each, a personal look at how a poet lives and writes in this troubling time. The excitement of this collection is in the details—how lives are lived and poems written over time, and at last, an entire body of work as witness.

Green Writers Press • Brattleboro, VT

Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry

Co-edited with his successor as Poet Laureate Chard deNiord.

Green Writers Press • Brattleboro, VT

No Doubt the Nameless

“NO DOUBT THE NAMELESS” delves the depths of elegy, yet moves at last into as positive a reading as Sydney Lea’s poems have ever shown of the human situation. Here are familiar rural characters, whose sturdiness and joy figure as strongly into Lea’s narratives, both overt and implied, as do their trials and misfortunes.

Four Way Books • New York, NY

What’s The Story?: Reflections on a Life Grown Long

In his final major publication as Poet Laureate of Vermont, Sydney Lea offers another reminder of the local sensibilities that ground his work. Lea highlights his support fo the state’s creative economy by publishing his latest collection of creative essays, “What’s the Story?: Reflections of a Life Grown Long”, with the young yet celebrated Green Writers Press. Founded in 2013, Green Writers Press has enjoyed steady growth working with both new authors and established masters including Billy Collins, Howard Frank Mosher, Greg Delanty, Annie Proulx, Megan Mayhew Bergman, Julia Alvarez, and more.

Green Writers Press • Brattleboro, VT

I Was Thinking of Beauty

The poems in Sydney Lea’s I WAS THINKING OF BEAUTY often grow out of reminiscence, but they are poems without nostalgia, in which the harsh has equal billing with the beautiful, in which memories are approached not as sources of grand revelation but as nodes of vitality that the poet is still in the process of understanding. Meanwhile, as he probes them, he is equally aware that all memory is construction, “including,” as he says in the wonderful “Ars Vitae,” “the things that really happened.” In the tension between going back and reaching forward, between the wish to understand the past and the wish to create a version of life true to one’s deepest wishes, a resonant beauty is created.
– Carl Dennis

Four Way Books • New York, NY

A North Country Life: Tales of Woodsmen Waters and Wildlife

The story of my connection to family, friends, and the northern outdoors. Organized by the changing of seasons, featuring essays on topics like childhood family fishing trips in the wilds of Maine, trophy fly-fishing the northern reaches of the Connecticut River, the opening day of turkey hunting season in Vermont, and getting lost in the deep woods while deer hunting. The book also recalls vanished mentors, men and women who inhabited upper New England before the advent of power tools and electricity.

Bringing to life the outdoors as seen through different eyes, inspiring you to take a new look at the world around you with 24 b/w illustrations.

Skyhorse Publishing • New York, NY

A Hundred Himalayas: Essays on Life and Literature

The book comprises a selection of my essays from over 40 years, representing what Flannery O’Connor called persistent “preoccupations” (as opposed to theory). I hope each speculation may be a small Himalaya, that with others it achieves some elevation by way of its increments. The essays muse on my favored American genius, Robert Frost, on the workings of imagination, on the American nature essay, on rural existence, but perhaps chiefly on fitting one’s own literary life into his everyday life.

University of Michigan Press • Ann Arbor, MI

Six Sundays Toward a Seventh: Spiritual Poems

“The life in Sydney Lea’s poems is entirely local, whether the locale is Italy, Montana, or his home in Vermont . . . The making of the soul that occurs in Sydney Lea’s poems is intimately connected with the place where the making occurs . . . Sydney Lea’s poems show us that all spirituality is local spirituality. He is our preeminent poet of the soul’s making among local places and people.”
– Mark Jarman, Author of Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems

Wipf & Stock • Eugene, OR

Young of the Year

Masterly narrative, supple lyricism balanced by an unflinching honesty. Lea’s poems inform and surprise the reader at every turn. In both the black cormorant ‘whose feet are so far astern he’s unbalanced on land’ and the pigeon-toed tractor, ‘nodding and rusting on the margin of the field’ this extraordinary poet finds an elegance and beauty that can be glimpsed throughout his often harsh landscape.
– Maxine Kumin

Wipf & Stock • Eugene, OR

A Little Wildness: Some Notes On Rambling

What does a good long ramble in the woods tell us about our shared experiences, our loneliness? Is it possible to shed our civilized layers of defensive behavior, our fear of unmasking and discovery, of the unknown or once-known but forgotten? Join celebrated outdoorsman and poet Sydney Lea as he walks off into his beloved New England woods on a vision quest that touches everyone who reads along to keep him company. One’s own shape-shifting powers come into focus in the light of Lea’s surprising discoveries and revelations.

Sydney Lea is as fine a companion on the page as American writing about nature has to offer.
– Michael Pollan, Harper’s

Amazon • Seattle, WA

Ghost Pain

“Wonder: Red Beans & Ricely” from Ghost Pain won a Pushcart Prize.

Singer of stories, lyric raconteur, Sydney Lea has evolved—through a long, rich career—into one of America’s most harrowing and honest poets. Ghost Pain is his most eloquent and wrenching book. This poetry implodes categories. If we must give it a label, let’s call it talking blues. If we must describe it with a single word, let’s call it heartbreaking.
– T.R. Hummer

To say that Ghost Pain offers us glimpses of an “examined life” would be too tepid. Lea’s poems—with their heavily freighted, measured talk—enact a journey into and finally through self that is both unsparing and urgent. They give honesty back its good name by demonstrating that it must be hard won, achieved. It’s a remarkable book, which takes his work to a new level.
– Stephen Dunn

Much of current poetry seems composed for solo harmonica, but in Ghost Pain, Sydney Lea is writing for the full symphony orchestra. The lush vocabulary of particular things is here, as well as the assimilated prosody of centuries of English verse. Lea is a rightly celebrated poet, writing here at the height of his powers, and Ghost Pain is an important book, in part because of the supple richness and generosity of its language:

No matter how I bushwack on my rambles
so that from aerial view each might resemble

a rabbit’s beat, a maze, an ampersand
(I turn myself, I turn my thoughts around)….

But Lea is up to more than beautiful language. Ghost Pain articulates and explores many of the most painful, important themes of the last century, which extend like feelings from a lost limb into the current century: addiction, violence, and relation of the individual to the community and larger world, the uses and the inadequacies of art. In Lea’s poems, these subjects are examined, not through the trendy lens of disembodied poetic consciousness, but through the lives and language of actual people. Lea renders the voices of rural New England–Tony, the poet’s friend who rebuilds a classic Chevy; singers in the church choir; children playing on the town square lawn. In Lea’s rendering, these people may look like a Rockwell painting–the New England backdrop is little changed–but they are more the descendants of Frost’s people in their inner dark, no longer sure of their purpose or place. They are, in short, our contemporaries. The poems of Ghost Pain are generous in linguistic delight, powerful in feeling without resort to sentimentality, and ambitious in their engagement of large subject. They are adult poems–nourishment for those who go to poetry for more than diversion. They are the reason we need poetry.

Amazon • Seattle, WA

Pursuit of a Wound

Finalist, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 2001.

“Sydney Lea demands attention, He weaves a close, intricate picture best described as the New England of his own mind…. Lea is a fine regional port, in the same sense that Frost was first and foremost a poet of place.”
– Publishers Weekly

“[Lea’s poetry] is elegiac, sad yet redemptive, and succeeds either shaped into free or traditionally formal verse.”
– Hudson Review

“Hats off to a master poet.”
– Carl Little, Maine Times

Sydney Lea is known for his mastery of the narrative style and his clear, unwavering vision of the natural world and humanity’s place in it. His latest work, Pursuit of a Wound, is marked by this acuity and by his uncanny ear for language as well as his willingness to speak for the unlucky and the dispossessed.

Delving in equal measure into the flinty northern New England landscape and the exiled souls of ordinary people, Pursuit of a Wound moves beyond Lea’s previous work to explore new poetic strategies, including some that approach prose poetry. Combining a free-ranging sensibility akin to Whitman’s with a keen attention to verse’s formal possibilities, this collection of twenty-eight new poems evokes a beautiful and threatened place and ratifies Lea’s status as heir-apparent to Robert Frost.

Amazon • Seattle, WA

To the Bone

Co-winner, The Poets’ Prize, 1998.

Long known as a master narrative poet, Sydney Lea combines a sure lyrical ear with a storyteller’s eye for plot, character, and physical detail. His poems, according to Stanley Plumly, “live at the level at which lyricism is crowded with the daily lives of those who will or cannot speak for themselves–the doomed, the disenfranchised, the local dead. At this most vocal, his love ethic is indistinguishable from his elegy. He embraces what he cannot change.

To the Bone gathers the best of Lea’s five previous collections and adds a section of new poems, assembled here for the first time. Well known and highly praised for his brilliance in long poetic forms, he reveals in the newest poems of his collection another Lea, equally proficient – and magnificent – in shorter forms.

He is a “poet’s poet” who nonetheless cannot help but make friends and avid fans of all those who fall under his word weaving spell. The title poem, a strong and uplifting tour de force, is astonishing in its emotional and spiritual breadth.

Amazon • Seattle, WA

Hunting the Whole Way Home

Emerson described the hunter as “commanded in nature by the living power which he feels to be there present.” The autobiographical essays in the elegiac collection convey that sense of living power, for Sydney Lea goes far beyond colorful accounts of tramping through Vermont woods following a gun dog’s bell or a buck’s trail. Hunting the Whole Way Home is a search for a personal philosophy or, as Robert Frost put it, a union of avocation and vocation, in which Lea explores the connection between his love for nature and his passion for writing.

“A first-rate outdoor memoir of one of our most distinguished contemporary American poets. It’s a highly entertaining, beautifully written, and searingly honest account of a lifetime of hunting and fishing experiences … It is especially good on grouse and trout, fathers and sons, marriage, and enduring friendships … a book to be treasured by everyone who values what remains of our precious natural world.”
– Howard Frank Mosher

“These tales and essays about one man’s explorations of the natural world, in the company of a vivid series of guides-including woodsmen, children, even a few animals are fresh as spring, and equally intoxicating.”
– Michael Pollan, Harper’s

Amazon • Seattle, WA

A Place in Mind

“A Place in Mind carried me spinning up back eddies, drifting through the layered currents of this intensely moving account of northern water, distance, separation. It’s full of brilliant images and strange poetic details, and the quality of writing is superb — so good it hurts to read it…. A Place in Mind is a wonderful book.”
– E. Annie Proulx

“Sydney Lea has a special affection for the world, especially the outdoors, but time is the stream in which he is fishing. There is something thorough and substantial and gracious here, something with the long reach of other eras. It’s a book with freight: a friendship, love, bodies of water, and the smell of wood smoke. A Place in Mind took me forward and backward through the stations of being a man…. And the tour was touching and elegant.”
– Ron Carlson

“Far and away the most exciting and best-written novel to come out of New England since Ernie Hebert’s The Dogs of March. It’s rich with fishing and hunting lore, believable, gritty upland characters, a splendid evocation of McLean, and a carefully-developed theme of unending friendship based on shared values.”
– Howard Frank Mosher

Amazon • Seattle, WA

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Now Look

Set against a backdrop of the remote northern Maine wilderness, fishing, hunting, and the pleasures of outdoor life bring together a mismatched pair of friends—weaving back and forth between past and present, it follows the friendship of ivy-league educated George Mayes and semi-literate woodsman and logger Evan Butcher. George, a drunk from his college days has a critical, life-changing moment of insight, and begins postgraduate life, however improbably, as a reckless school bus driver. After getting clean and sober, he develops a successful school transportation business. Having taken a number of trips to the north woods, he has come to know and revere Evan. At the story’s opening, Evan is a store of knowledge, decency, and even of wisdom. But after a series of horrendous family tragedies, he begins to succumb to alcohol himself.

Now, Look, from Vermont poet laureate and Pulitzer finalist Sydney Lea is a moving novel about second chances, missed chances, and redemption.

Amazon