An Uncommon Accord
Four accomplished poets, with four distinct voices, come together to create An Uncommon Accord. Read and listen to excerpts.
REVIEWERS’ COMMENTS
The four splendid and drastically individuated poets included in An Uncommon Accord manage, paradoxically enough, to create a harmony and a conversation among one another worthy of the great string quartets. The tensions between them are not violent but musical. They energize and transform the unique experience of each poem and poet; they give a permanent glow to the beautiful local civilization that is this book.
Michael Carman is a poet of impeccable eye and ear; the diamond-cutter line, the pulse-quickening cadence. I admire this collection’s commanding technique how the adjective “lace-up” repeated over a stanza break ratchets up tension, and in a breath conveys the contingency of immigration . . . These meticulously honed poems are informed by an integrating, visionary humanity.
In GEORGE KRAUS’s poems we find ourselves in the realm of creation and destruction seemingly at once. It is on this fine line that Kraus so deftly balances.
MARCIA ARRIETA’s work is all about serious play. A yearning for larger, more formalized bodies of knowledge is met by the drive to notice, to see fully on an intimate, human scale.
In Draglines, each of PAT LANDRETH KELLER’s poems function as a “dragline,” working to pull meaning from the past. Her signature “story-made-myth” combines key elements of any good tale: desire and trespass.
. . . that line between one environment and another, is a place of richness for MICHAEL CARMAN. Studies of generations allow for deeper explorations of this state where opposites . . . live in a kind of earthly harmony.
One of the great pleasures of An Uncommon Accord is the way in which distinctly different aesthetics engage in conversation about essential issues . . . without constraints of subject or approach, poems do and will speak across time and temperament.
MEET THE AN UNCOMMON ACCORD AUTHORS
Marcia Arrieta is a high school English teacher and editor/publisher of the poetry journal, Indefinite Space. Her work has appeared in many journals including Otoliths, 13th Moon, Osiris, Blueprint Review, and her chapbook, experimental:, was published by Potes and Poets Press. She has an MFA from Vermont College. Arrieta lives on the canyon in Pasadena, CA and often escapes into philosophy, nature, music and art.
Michael Carman’s poems have appeared in Rattapallax, The Same, Lumina, en(compass), and other journals. She was a finalist for the 2007 Codhill Press Poetry Chapbook Award. She holds a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Carman has taught poetry at Sing Sing Prison and in programs sponsored by Poets & Writers in New York City. She teaches writing at FIT/SUNY in Manhattan.
Pat Landreth Keller is a freelance writer of nonfiction and poetry who lives in Middle Georgia. She has received a Georgia Council for the Arts Individual Artist Award in poetry, and has published in a number of magazines. She is completing a novel and writing a pictorial and social history of Middle Georgia folk pottery. She also works with museums, educational institutions, and individuals in preserving and promoting the material culture of the South.
George Kraus holds a PhD in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He has worked as translator and scholar. His most recent scholarly work was presented at an annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America. Kraus currently divides his time between Rio de Janeiro and Tarrytown, NY where he continues to write poetry and prose.
For review copies or to schedule readings, contact editor@toadlilypress.com.
