Darkened Rooms of Summer

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Darkened Rooms of Summer

New and Selected Poems

Jared Carter
Introduction by Ted Kooser

Ted Kooser Contemporary Poetry Series

220 pages

Paperback

March 2014

978-0-8032-4857-1

$19.95 Add to Cart
eBook (PDF)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

March 2014

978-0-8032-5349-0

$19.95 Add to Cart
eBook (EPUB)
Ebook purchases delivered via Leaf e-Reader

March 2014

978-0-8032-5385-8

$19.95 Add to Cart

About the Book

For nearly half a century Jared Carter has been quietly mapping the American heartland. Line by line, his poetry has shown us the landscape, sounded the voices, conjured the music, and tested the silence of the ever-changing and yet ever-constant Midwest that figures so prominently in the American story. And yet what we find in Carter’s poetry is endlessly new. Here, in poems selected from his first five books, is the summer-long buzz of the cicada and the crack of the cue ball, the young rebel on his big Harley, and the YMCA secretary who backstrokes her way across the indoor pool. Here, too, are thirty new poems in fixed form that illustrate Carter’s continued quest for a poetry of “universal interest.” Taken together, these selections are, truly, poetry in the American grain.
 

Author Bio

Jared Carter lives in Indiana. He has received the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, the Poets’ Prize, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and two literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Praise

“Carter’s is a poetry of a resolute middle distance, firmly of this world: between the dust under the earth and the dust of space there exists the place that the poem can illumine.”—Helen Vendler, New York Review of Books

“[Carter] writes American poetry the way that William Faulkner wrote American novels. . . . [Carter’s poems] have the homespun flavor of our native music—ballads, country blues, and sweet, clear, understated lyrics.”—Sally A. Lodge, Publishers Weekly

 
“[Jared Carter] is the rare poet who is rooted in a certain place, which is of course Indiana, yet [he] deals with it in such a way that it is of universal interest.”—Dana Gioia, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts

"Jared Carter writes the kind of poetry that death does not touch. He brings us a very different atmosphere from this crazy techie world, with a command of metaphor and the bones of memory that do not lie. We trust this poet's vision."—Grace Cavalieri, danmurano.com


"Those of us who practice the craft of poetry will want to keep Darkened Rooms of Summer close at hand, so we can study these poems, and wonder how Jared Carter ushers us so seamlessly into his world, and thus, more deeply into our own."—James Crews, basalt

"Jared Carter's poetry is pure, home-spun Americana, full of small-town people and places in the tradition of Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson."—Portland Book Review

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction by Ted Kooser
From Work, for the Night Is Coming / 1981
Geodes
Early Warning
The Madhouse
For Jack Chatham
Walking the Ties
Glacier
Mississinewa County Road
The Undertaker
The Oddfellows’ Waiting-Room at Glencove Cemetery
Monument City
Work, for the Night Is Coming
At the Sign-Painter’s
Turning the Brick
Landing the Bees
The Measuring
Ginseng
Shaking the Peonies
Birdstone
From After the Rain / 1993
After the Rain
Phoenix
Scryer
The Gleaning
The Shriving
The Purpose of Poetry
Mississinewa Reservoir at Winter Pool
Poem Written on a Line from the Walam Olum
Foundling
Cicadas
Barn Siding
Interview
Drawing the Antique
For an Old Flame
Portrait Studio
Cecropia Moth
For Starr Atkinson, Who Designed Books
Seed Storm
Galleynipper
Changeling
Mourning Doves
The Believers
From Les Barricades Mystérieuses / 1999
Improvisation
Summons
Candle
Berceuse
Cemetery
Interlude
Ford
Millefiori
Clavichord
Tankroom
Phosphorescence
Palimpsest
Labyrinth
Linen
Reprise
Hawkmoth
Comet
From Cross this Bridge at a Walk / 2006
Covered Bridge
Visit
Recollections of a Contingent of Coxey’s Army Passing through Straughan, Indiana, in April of 1894
Spirea
Picking Stone
From A Dance in the Street / 2012
Prophet Township
Roadside Crosses
Summit
Fire Burning in a 55-Gallon Drum
In the Warehouse District
In the Military Park
The Pool at Noon
Plastic Sack
Hidden Door
Wind Egg
What Is Dream?
Sphinx
War
At the Art Institute
Up in Michigan
Blank Paper
Under the Snowball Bush
Mourning Dove Ascending
Cicadas in the Rain
Snow
New Poems
Clouds
Schoolhouse
Dryad
Awakening
Homestead
Gone
Web
Etruria
Boleyn
Vow
Cross-harp
Torc
Ariadne
Poetry
Perseus
Twilight
Question
Polyxena
Graveyard
Achilles
Mourning
Philoctetes
Adultery
Armor
Priestess
Moth
Journeyman
Visitor
Prescription
Evergreen

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