Spencer Reece Selected Works

Acts, the third book of poetry by Reece, is the product of a decade of work and of a life acutely lived. In it, he celebrates the language and literature of Spain and tracks his tenure at the Spanish Episcopal Church. At times, the collection is a love letter to Madrid; at other moments, to Old Lyme, Connecticut, where the speaker’s parents lived until the death of his father, and to Little Compton, Rhode Island. The poems are also an homage to the letter itself, to its art and its waning means of connection across distance. In Acts, Reece confronts grief and love, loneliness and self-acceptance, with honesty, artful lyricism, and, above all, a true and luminous grace.

The illuminated medieval manuscripts known as Books of Hours have been used to guide contemplation and prayer for centuries, with their intricate designs and exquisite coloring. Devotional poet and priest Spencer Reece has revived the tradition with a collection of vibrant watercolors inspired by his life journeys and reflections on faith. The evocative images and accompanying texts in All the Beauty Still Left are sure to provoke contemplation and reflection for readers of all faiths.

A powerful dynamo of a story that weaves the author's experiences with an appreciation for seven great literary touchstones: Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, James Merrill, Mark Strand, George Herbert, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. In speaking to the beauty these poets' works inspire in him, Reece finds beauty in his own life's journey, from coming of age as a gay teenager in the 1980s to his life's work as an Episcopal priest. 

In a recent double fiction issue, The New Yorker devoted the entire back page to a single poem, "The Clerk's Tale," by Spencer Reece. The poet who drew such unusual attention has a surprising background: for many years he has worked for Brooks Brothers, a fact that lends particular nuance to the title of his collection. The Clerk's Tale pays homage not only to Chaucer but to the clerks' brotherhood of service in the mall, where "the light is bright and artificial, / yet not dissimilar to that found in a Gothic cathedral." The fifty poems in The Clerk's Tale are exquisitely restrained, shot through with a longing for permanence, from the quasi-monastic life of two salesmen at Brooks Brothers to the poignant lingering light of a Miami dusk to the weight of geography on an empty Minnesota farm.