March Street Press will soon publish a full-length collection of my poetry entitled,
Poems New, Used, and Rebuilds. As the title implies, it is a new and selected format. The book contains my favorites poems from my three chapbooks (with some poems rewritten -- hence,
Rebuilds) and it also contains fourteen new poems from the last three years. The book is about 90 pages. I'm really proud of the collection, and I need to thank Robert Bixby for doing such an excellent job nurturing it into being. I also need to thank my dear friend Ken Meisel for writing the following blurb about the book . . .
In this collection of selected and new poems, Jeff Vande Zande writes from the landscapes of deserted highways after midnight, basements full of family secrets and backyards where the interplay of father and son become the ties that bind them together. He finds again and again that the true value of human experience, the daily act of living and loving these essential bits of Heaven here on earth in a world simultaneously becoming present and absent at once, lies in the small, decisive actions we take to honor and love it. In this way, Vande Zande is a pragmatist in the face of existence and annihilation. His poetry—a tight music born out of silence that becomes responsive to the small details that ignite consciousness—proves over and over again that to survive is to be present and useful in the face of transience. What I like about these poems is their refusal to blink away at the impotence, loss, beauty and gratitude that we feel in the face of what is loveable and losable—whether it is a scattering of birds, a dead father, a stretch of mysterious blacktop, a wife or a newborn child. In one early poem entitled “Up into the Light” Vande Zande writes “everything seems to be flickering, a candle losing oxygen,” and in another, called “Survival Tactics” he answers, “The fire the men kindled now owns them—it’s the only way they know to hold off the darkness.” In a recent poem about marriage, Vande Zande further develops his vision when he writes that “every union dangles from a small hook, tries to fill the emptiness of coffee cups, to make a true line that holds everything together.” In these selected poems, some about the homesickness of driving alone at night, some that address the enchantments and concomitant threats implicit in the commitment to love another person, and some that celebrate the healing joys of fatherhood, Vande Zande reasserts again and again that the one true line that holds everything together in a world of darkness, transience and possibility, is love.
What a beautiful blurb -- almost a poem by itself. In any case, if you are interested in the new collection, shoot me an email (
jcvandez@delta.edu) and we can make payment and shipping arrangements.
Thanks.
