WILMINGTON — Join Bartleby’s Books for an afternoon of poetry with Sydney Lea and Lawrence Raab. The poetry readings and discussion will begin at 3 p.m. on Saturday, April 16, at the bookstore. Both poets will read from their latest volumes of poetry and answer questions from the audience before signing books.
Lea was Poet Laureate of Vermont from 2011-2015. His most recent collection of poems, No Doubt the Nameless, was just released by Four Way Books. He has 11 previous book of poetry in addition to books of essays. In November he released his fourth collection of essays, What’s the Story? Short Takes on a Life Grown Long, published by Vermont’s Green Writers Press.
Lea founded New England Review in 1977 and edited it until 1989. Of his 11 previous poetry collections, Pursuit of a Wound was one of three finalists for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Lea has been described as a man in the woods with his head full of books and a man in books with his head full of woods.
His affection for story — moreover, an affection derived in no small measure from men and women elders in New England — colors his poetry, just as a relish for the musical properties of the word colors his prose. His lifelong passion for the natural world informs almost his every utterance.
Raab is the author of more than half a dozen collections of poetry, including What We Don’t Know About Each Other, selected for the National Poetry Series by Stephen Dunn, and a finalist for the National Book Award; Visible Signs: New and Selected Poems; The History of Forgetting, and Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts (2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He collaborated with Stephen Dunn on a chapbook of poems, Winter at the Caspian Sea (1999).
Raab has taught at various institutions including American University, the University of Michigan, and Williams College, where is Morris Professor of Rhetoric. Conversational yet precise, Raab’s lyrical meditations trace human fallibility and doubt.
As Boston Review critic Don Colburn noted in a review of What We Don’t Know About Each Other, “Lawrence Raab’s gracefully haunting poems explore the fine lines of our temporal lives‚ between distance and intimacy, limits and possibility, present and past … In Raab’s poems, reason and faith are not as far apart as they sometimes seem.”