Jane Mead
Jane Mead’s collections of poetry include The Lord and the General Din of the World (1996), The House of Poured-Out Waters (2001), The Usable Field (2008), Money Money Money Water Water Water (2014), World of Mad and Unmade (2016), and To the Wren: New and Collected Poems (2019). Her poems have been published widely in anthologies and journals and she was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and a Whiting Award in Poetry. Mead taught at Colby College, The University of Iowa, Wake Forest University, and Drew University, among other colleges and university. She managed the ranch her grandfather purchased in the early 1900's in Northern California and was the co-owner of Prairie Lights, a book store in Iowa City, Iowa. Mead passed away in 2019.
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The Lord and the General Din of the WorldPoemsFrom"Fall"
There is a strange world
in the changing of a light bulb,
the waxing of a bookshelf
I think I could grow by,
as into a dusty dream
in which each day layers
against one just past
and molds the one to come,
content as cabbage
drudging towards harvest.
The Lord and the General Din of the World:Poems -
The Lord and the General Din of the WorldPoemsFrom"My Father’s Flesh"
The worms are
working their way to his heart.
Every day there are more of them
inside him. They enter
his white arms and leave
their red tracks.
Their red tracks
scorch me when I go to hug him
and a black mouth ruptures
on my forehead. It
will not stop laughing.
I cannot find my hat.
Worms. Mouth. Scorch.
The Lord and the General Din of the World:Poems -
The Lord and the General Din of the WorldPoemsFrom"Substance Abuse Trial"
Now you stand accused
of wanting to die, of saying so
endlessly, with needles – and the speechless
track marks recording it all.
The evidence is
a red river, mounting.
It wants to carry you
away like an old chair
some fisherman forgot
to take home. And I want
to shout: Listen
- this man
is my father.
I love him.
The Lord and the General Din of the World:Poems
“I have not read, in a long time, a book of poems so unswervingly eloquent, so filled with sorrow and beauty, so powerfully connected to nature and advocacy for a dying earth as Jane Mead’s new collection [Money Money Money | Water Water Water].” —Los Angeles Times
"In [Mead's] breathtaking second collection . . . [she] has distilled narrative to a startling purity. An extraordinary tactile silence abound in Mead's taut, uncompromising emotional landscape, which ranges through grief, anger, complicity, petition, cowardice, grace . . . The smallest, most fragile events are taken in by Mead, delicately, unrelentingly, and are weighted with purpose, seen deeply, imbued with the capacity to speak with composure to the ineffable and the horrific, equally." —Lia Purpura, The Antioch Review [on House of Poured-Out Waters]
"There is a mood—connected to solitude—that is not loneliness and not despair, but that feels like it could turn into either if you did not try to love the world, or at least look at it attentively. This book seems written from that place. It's a book to be read slowly and quietly, if you are to feel your way into its deep sadness and its small, sudden well of joy." —U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass, The Washington Post Book World [on The Lord and the General Din of the World]
Selected Works
