Reports from an Interior Province by Jeff Gundy

Reports from an Interior Province by Jeff Gundy

$27.00

Reports from an Interior Province: New and Selected Poems traces Jeff Gundy’s long journey as a restless, searching, embodied poet, rooted in his native Midwest and Mennonite tradition but constantly seeking new articulations, locations, and forms. Including work from eight published books and generous sets of new and uncollected poems, Reports showcases Gundy’s enduring love of long-lined, unrhymed couplets that allow generous breathing space for his frequent swoops and veers among subjects and settings. His range also extends over brief lyrics, prose poems, and extended, multi-section narratives and meditations. Gundy’s associative leaps and stretches flirt with surrealism and the fantastic, yet return often to natural landscapes and threads of quirky narrative.

“If Whitman were born in the Midwest to Mennonite parents, listened to Dylan and the Dead and loved to laugh at himself, observes Philip Metres, “he’d sound just like Jeff Gundy.” Gundy traces both the sturdy beauties and the griefs and traumas of his home territory in poems like “Where I Live,” from Flatlands: “how we love it, how we hate it, / how it did not quite kill us young.”

His farm-boy earthiness has carried through Gundy’s career as poet and professor, though Reports is also salted with poems about the small college life and leavened by generous doses of humor. “Most students believe they’re more honest than most students,” he observes ruefully in “Notes from the Faculty Meeting,” and “After a national search, we hired Randy’s brother.”

William Blake, Emily Dickinson, and William Stafford are also important forebears, as well as dozens more poets, writers, and musicians—a skilled guitarist, Gundy also writes and performs his own songs. Early on, Andrew Hudgins noted Gundy’s characteristic theological curiosity, as well as his “verve, wit, passion, and deep intelligence.” His poems have long contended with doubt and reverence, edging toward the mystical but refusing dogmatism, as in “Contemplation on Rain and Religion”:

But I know this: one day I must learn

to give up for good on getting dry,
to love the hiss of water falling into water,

the gray lake meeting the gray rain,
so little between them, our slender place

between the great sky and the stones.
Hold tight, I tell my heart, here we go.

Restless curiosity, and a Fulbright grant, led Gundy to extended stays in Salzburg and Lithuania, as well as many briefer journeys, and his poems often find fresh energy and unexpected rewards in encounters with new landscapes, cities, and people. “So much easier to blow things up than to get them right,” he writes in “Rhapsody with Dark Matter,” set in “the finest little town in Arkansas.” “Letter to J. from the Ramada Inn Western Avenue, Albany” culminates with a main theme of his long career: “God wants / us all to love each other. But only / very slowly can we teach each other how.”

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Description

  • Kind: Perfectbound 
  • Pages: 376
  • Language: English
  • Date Published: May 2025 
  • ISBN 978-1-962847-24-7

Praise

Truly a wonderful book. The portrait of the speaker that emerges is one of a neighborly metaphysician, a deep, quirky, philosophical, humorous mind surveying the world and everything in it with great care, compassion, pity. —Li-Young Lee

Jeff Gundy isn’t afraid of writing in the direction of the weird, strange, uncanny or odd —all words he isn’t afraid to use in a poem either —nor does he fear writing directly toward beauty, truth and God. —Julia Kasdorf

If Whitman were born in the Midwest to Mennonite parents, listened to Dylan and the Dead and loved to laugh at himself, he’d sound just like Jeff Gundy. His poetry reminds us, over and over, that paying attention to the delights and troubles of existence becomes a kind of psalm to this botched and beautiful creation. —Philip Metres 

Jeff Gundy writes immensely sane poetry made rarer by its simultaneous preservation of recklessness, surely one of poetry’s primary tasks. —Dean Young

I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve read a book in which the author seemed to be so constantly in motion, so restless in his insatiable curiosity. How very attractive I find that, especially when it comes borne on genuine humility and unaffected generosity. This is a remarkable collection. —Ted Kooser

Reading Flatlands, you feel the author’s honesty palpably, his lack of side; these are genuine, searching poems, with no airs about them, full of wry wonder and warmth. —Jean Valentine

Inquiries possesses more theological curiosity than any book I’ve read in years, and Gundy engages his subjects with verve, wit, passion, and deep intelligence. —Andrew Hudgins

What a delight it is to encounter the rich and compelling world of Jeff Gundy’s Flatlands. These are poems of real vision and power, often darkly playful yet always resonant with both life’s pleasures and its regrets. —David St. John

These vivid meditations call us to enter the whirl of our desires. With wit and passion, Jeff Gundy investigates our deep roots of longing for God and the other. He offers an unforgettable ride. In a voice both brave and tender he carries us through rain-streaked darkness and sun’s glare towards love, towards those who call us to “bring yourself home.” —Jean Janzen

Just as a river finds inevitable kinship between remote hills and a distant sea, this book employs the prehensile reach of poetry to link local wisdom and distant war, to bind sacred callings and daily life. —Kim Stafford

Impish, probing, and expansive, Gundy’s poems reward the mind and replenish the spirit, speaking truth in the most human way. —Lynn Powell

Jeff Gundy observes, with a humble, winsome eye…and an ear for song. . . . What a joy it is to follow the trails he traces across the page—and out into the world. —Terry Hermsen

Excerpt

Bears

And some folks even see the bear in me.
-Steven Fromholz, “Bears”

Do you want to see bears, our host asked, and No I said at once,
I have no desire to get mauled, but the very next day we saw
a grizzly in the lake. It climbed the bank as the boat veered close,
rose up on the steep shore like an elemental, vanished.
And that night a black bear tipped off the lid of the can
by the garage, found nothing tempting, wandered on.
I will not say more of them, or the cabin without running water
with many old sitcoms on DVD, or the cabin with the awkward
noisy staircase. I must tell how my father took it on himself to die
four days into the trip, two days after we saw him miserable
in the care home, saying Do you trust these people? and Can I please
take off this shirt? Please? We got the call as we fought a hot headwind
into South Dakota, too late to turn back, too late for everything,
and so he haunted the highway all the way to Billings, to Boise,
to Golden, haunted the mountains he never saw in his ninety years,
traveled with us like the bear bell I clipped to the day pack.
It chimed and clinked unsteadily as we trudged and clambered,
a fragile ward against danger, one that either worked or served
only to jingle us on our way. I looked for bears black and grizzled
every two to twenty minutes but never had to pull the clumsy cylinder
of bear spray from its place. Anyway I could not imagine
that I could save myself or anyone from the smallest, tamest bear
with such a flimsy ward, with no training in its use. But we heard
only the bear bell, saw only scat, and at last I knew I had not
spoken truly, I wanted to see bears and live, to be among those
who have seen bears and ghosts, who have a story to tell.

Author

Jeff GundyJeff Gundy grew up on a farm in central Illinois and studied at Goshen College and Indiana University, where he earned his Ph.D. He is Distinguished Poet in Residence at Bluffton University. His eight books of poems include Without a Plea and Abandoned Homeland (both from Bottom Dog, 2019 and 2015), Somewhere Near Defiance (Anhinga, 2014), for which he was named Ohio Poet of the Year, and Spoken among the Trees (Akron, 2007), winner of the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize. Earlier prose books include Songs from an Empty Cage (Cascadia, 2013), Walker in the Fog: On Mennonite Writing (Cascadia, 2005), winner of the Dale E Brown Award, and A Community of Memory: My Days with George and Clara (Illinois, 1996). Recent poems and essays are in Georgia Review, The Sun, Kenyon Review, Forklift, Ohio, Christian Century, Image, Cincinnati Review, Terrain, and other journals. A 2008 Fulbright lecturer at the University of Salzburg, he taught regularly at the Antioch Writers Workshop and Language of Nature workshops in Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Lynn Powell writes, “Impish, probing, and expansive, Gundy’s poems reward the mind and replenish the spirit.” Of Wind Farm, Scott Russell Sanders says “[Gundy] carried along from his rural upbringing riches of imagination that are abundantly displayed in these pages.”

His web page is https://jeffgundy.com/

Additional information

Weight 1.74 oz
Dimensions 9 × 6 × 1 in

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