Reports from an Interior Province

<p><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Reports from an Interior Province: New and Selected Poems </em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>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 </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Reports </em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>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.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> </span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>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 </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Flatlands</em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>: how we love it how we hate it / how it did not quite kill us young.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> </span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>His farm-boy earthiness has carried through Gundy's career as poet and professor though </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Reports </em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>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.</span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> </span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> 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.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>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.</span></p><p></p>