Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 98
- Language: English
- Published: November, 2014
- ISBN: 978-1-939929-20-4
Awards
Shortlisted for Rubery Book Award (2015)
A beautiful collection from this well-published US poet; poems to do with myths and searching for words in the Greek language, including legitimate comparisons with the Greek poet, Cavafy. Many of the poems are perceptive, vivid and powerful. “Conference” (p56) is a wonderful poem, and there are others. There’s a great sense of mystery and of something important behind the poems. The poet is a knowledgeable and erudite guide.
Praise
In his superb new volume, Don Schofield deepens into loss—of love and language, of history and home. “The greatest thing’s to leave no mark at all,” he affirms, yet longing draws us to moments “when nothing matters but the curve / of one body in the hollow of another.” The questions Schofield poses—“Where do the lost words go?” and “how many // blessings do I need?’—echo across the distances between lovers, between countries. In Lands Imagination Favors reverberates with such exquisite and ineffable uncertainties. — Michael Waters
A stunning collection—Don Schofield’s poetry, his sensibility, has traveled through two cultures to make itself. As a result, the poems are unusually rich, vibrant with the personal losses, direct in the articulation of the pleasures of the journey. —Dennis Schmitz
As the title of one of these poems suggests, a major focus here is traveling Greece, but the modes for doing so are original, highly evocative, at the end profoundly moving. The landscape is chosen to offer color through details that are both recognizable and metaphoric, places that carry a name familiar to those who celebrate the life of the senses but who are also transported to the land of mythology, characters and their anecdotes who inhabit the bright contemporary world but who are haunted by a harsher history. And the persona provides the voice of discovery, failed happiness, and reconciliation that establishes the emotional truth of so much of the poetry. It is a poetry not to be missed by travelers familiar with this Mediterranean world and also by those prepared to explore its new access to an imaginary world beyond. —Edmund Keeley
Excerpt
With Homer’s Words
There are, of course, conjectures in abundance….
Richard John Cunliffe, A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect
I want to build a house just like the man
across the bay who whistles as he pulls
bricks from the back of his donkey, a house of words
or shards of words from Homer’s time. In the modern
language I struggle with, I labor so,
his words are lost, or broken, a few still whole.
Author
Don Schofield’s previous books include Approximately Paradise, (University Press of Florida, 2002). Kindled Terraces: American Poets in Greece (Truman State University Press, 2004), The Known: Selected Poems [of Nikos Fokas], 1981 – 2000 (Ypsilon Press, Athens, 2010) and Before Kodachrome (FutureCycle Press, 2012). His poems and translations have received honors from, among others, the London Hellenic Society, the State University of New York, Anhinga Press and Princeton University, where he was a Writer-in-Residence at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies. A resident of Greece for many years, he currently lives in Thessaloniki, where he serves as Dean of Special Programs at Perrotis College, a division of the American Farm School.
