Chris Agee

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Biographical note:  Chris Agee was born in 1956 in San Francisco and grew up in Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island. He attended Harvard University and since 1979 has lived in Ireland. He is the author of two books of poems, In the New Hampshire Woods (The Dedalus Press, 1992) and First Light (The Dedalus Press, 2003). He edits Irish Pages, a journal of contemporary writing based at The Linen Hall Library, Belfast. He reviews for The Irish Times and has recently completed a new collection of poems, Next to Nothing (Salt, 2009), which will be published in Britain, Ireland and the United States in January 2009.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714896
ISBN:  9781844714896
Author:  Chris Agee
Title:  Next to Nothing
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Jan-09
Extent:  128pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  14 mm
Weight:  192 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 23.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Next to Nothing records the years following the death of a beloved child in 2001. Though bereft of belief in the poetic outcome compared to the apocalypse of the loss itself (one sense of the title), the fidelity of these poems to the “heartscapes” of grief constitutes, nonetheless, a work of genuine honouring – spare, delicate, and deeply moving.

Main description:  Next to Nothing records the years following the death of a beloved child in 2001. Though bereft of belief in the poetic outcome compared to the apocalypse of the loss itself (one sense of the title), the fidelity of these poems to the “heartscapes” of grief constitutes, nonetheless, a work of genuine honouring – spare, delicate, and deeply moving.

Of the collection in general, Agee has written:

“In addition to individual poems and several sequences, Next to Nothing includes a section entitled ‘Heartscapes’, which consists of 59 ‘micro-poems’, as I call them. Many of these are extremely short; most were written during the very bleak and soul-sick year of 2003; and the whole section (with one poem per page) will take no more than thirty minutes to read, and indeed can be read with ease by any general intelligent reader, whatever their familiarity with or experience of poetry. Swiftness of effect was, in fact, part of the intention and fidelity; the challenge here as throughout the book was to record true and deep ‘heart-feeling’ (as opposed to the ‘feeling’ of sensibility, apperception, historical moment, etc.) – that most delicate of poetic material, owing to the swiftness of emotion itself. For once, I think I can say that these poems wrote themselves, in the sense of my being a quite passive amanuensis caught up in pain rather than any sort of instigator – drawing on the habit of technique belonging to what had become a previous life, whilst suddenly also bereft of belief in the poetic outcome compared to the apocalypse of the loss itself – that is to say, the textual as ‘next to nothing’, in several distinct senses, like Matisse’s sparest line-drawings in a sea of blank space …”

Table of contents:
At Bethlehem Nursery
A Bouquet from Miriam
Heaney at Struga
Depths
Sebald
Next to Nothing
Attic Grace
The Tulip Tree
Life
The Apocalypse of Fishes
The August Dream
Mirage
The Science of Lampshades
Heartscapes
Heartlands
1 Observatory, Empire State Building
2 The Mall
3 Amish Quilt, Kalona
4 Limantour Beach, Point Reyes
5 Boston Common
Alpine Interlude
Sea-campion
The Zebra Finches
Tea-herb
Crolly Woods
Circumpolar
In the Adriatic
Night Ferry
August Ghost
Keepsakes
Zephyr
Near Dubrovnik
Sea-cloud
Darwinian Scrabble
Talisman
Nightsky
In the Hammock
Love
The Bench
Sea Snail
[Sic]
Knin Eclogue
In Prvo Selo
"The Sarajevo Music-box"
After Hay-on-Wye
Coda

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Excerpt from book:  

Crolly Woods

We stumbled
into it, off
a bulldozed lay-by,
its banks guarded

by the titular
April of marsh
marigold and
primrose, sorel

and wood anemone
stippling the green
sward’s floodplain
of climax growth

littered by branches
of blowdown — alder,
whitethorn, oaks,
hazel, dwarf willow …

Up above, it seemed
straight out of
Heaney in Sweeney
Astray, only

the cress was missing:
ancient fragment
of birchwoods,
lichened and ungrazed,

a shoulder’s touch
snapping the pristine
deadwood, all shaggy
bole in wan

shafts of sunshine,
walls and erratics
velveted with heath-moss
and violets, haggard

hosting silver birch
and gnarled trunks
of gorse, hart’s tongue
betwixt stones, hollies

of hardy girth
dappling their berries
on leaf-litter as if
the folklife of dead

Diarmuid and Grainne.
In the middle
hollow, a clearing’s
mire of straw-grass

tussocks and fragrant
bayberry; by the bedrock
falls, a side-eddy
of churning turbulence

swirling foam
and gorse flowers,
sunken fern, tods
of ivy. An old

farmstead hilltop,
its whin-bushes
on the moor’s edge
thick as juniper
in Arizona,
pedunculate oaks
centuries old
overhanging

stream-boulders
wedged with plastic
drink containers …
Later, in the dead petrol

station below the quarry,
two locals, po-faced,
knew nothing (they
owned) of any of it.

Review quote:  It is a profound and exceptionally moving book. I haven’t read anything so powerful for a long time. I was left with a sense of both the fragility and the huge importance of the here and now, as well as with an expanded sense of poetry’s capacity.”

Hugh Dunkerley
The London Magazine

Review quote:  Next to love, grief is the great enabler of poems. In many ways grief is more powerful than love, whether in fiction or poetry. Love, especially if it is a happy collaboration between adults, excludes us from its golden circle even as readers, whereas grief, with its sense of crisis and abandonment, ignites our sense of humanity and calls us to become a part of its urgent business. In this, his latest collection of poems, the American born, Belfast-based poet, Chris Agee, has created a compelling, grief-stricken narrative.

Thomas McCarthy
Irish Times

Previous review quote:  First Light is very fine work indeed. Agee seems to have hit that fine balance between allusiveness and clarity, and formal control and spontaneity, that so few poets manage nowadays.”

Don Paterson

Previous review quote:  This is outstanding, mysterious, and beautiful work, and it deserves an American audience.

Emerson Blake

Previous review quote:  There are many reasons the book might be long-awaited and why it should be spoken well of. Agee’s lyric gift is considerable … In the very first poem, ‘Seacave,’ he tells us how, ‘You could hear the furious sizzle of midsummer crickets/Droning their hoarse heat-song and timed threnody/To a noon crescendo.’ It is one of a series of tours de force.

George Szirtes
The Irish Times

Previous review quote:  With First Light, Chris Agee makes a formidable impression with poems that show commitment, range, learning, skill, seriousness. Here is a poet that does not shirk the labour that Ezra Pound referred to when he said that each moment of inspiration has to be paid for in advance. Agee is in the line – or perhaps the wake – of the great modernists in that he has learned and absorbed their attitudes and methods. His poems are usually easily intelligible, but do not cater to the reader, frequently making references to places and people with whom he or she cannot be too familiar. An exciting tension runs through his work … It is refreshing to find someone writing so well as the opposite pole from the jokey postcard-type verse that so many now think is adequate. A celebratory if rigorous humanism pervades this book.

Rory Brennan
Books Ireland

Previous review quote:  Agee is a good carpenter. There’s a restraint and control in particular in the poems, which comes to counterpoint their detailed imagery … Agee is not merely interested in creating a language of description, however. His descriptions break into meditation, question and assertion in a way which suggests that his real interest lies in the attempt to render his own individual consciousness of time and place. There’s something Proustian in the enterprise … There’s also something of W.G. Sebald in the way Agee mixes factual detail and reflection in an attempt to create a kind of personal intellectual climate … The fidelity to his own experience that marks all of his poetry, is vital to its success.

John Knowles
Fortnight

Previous review quote:  Time [the second section, a mixture of poetry and prose] is of particular interest to me because of its wrestling with the hopelessly corrupted but indispensable word ‘spirit’, but many of the other pieces attracted me too. At first I felt Time as a succession of little obstacles – not understanding ‘the first spoor of an overnight mushroom’, wondering about ‘like’ a few lines further down – but then I suddenly fell into step with it and admired the richness and density of your notation of, especially, visual sensation. I disagreed with one reviewer’s objection to such references as that to Messiaen; the fact that it’s a cultural reference is already saying something complex and unparaphrasable-in-brief about wildbirdsong.

Tim Robinson

Previous review quote:  Praise for In the New Hampshire Woods (1992). In Chris Agee’s poetry, the richness of sound is the manifestation of a richness of thought. Line after line, there are quiet surprises of diction, cadence, accuracy. His awe of and his reverence for the visible world, the ‘bounty of Creation,’ remind me sometimes of Jeffers, but he is utterly without Jeffers’ sour misanthropy: only a profound sorrow for human failure in the face of so much radiance. He is a religious poet in an irreligious age. And at a time when so many poets huddle in a cramped vernacular, abandoning some of our strongest and sweetest words to the oblivion of dictionaries and crossword puzzles, I particularly prize his poems for their calmly sumptuous language, their overflowings, their adorations. They glitter with light, like the deep.

Robert Mezey

Previous review quote:  Agee's poems evoke the original world of the creation, not nature, seen in the light of that first day, which still reaches us.”

Samuel Menashe

Previous review quote:  Chris Agee's imagination is fine-tuned to the frequencies of matter itself and all its animate manifestations. Under his rapt, celebratory gaze his chosen American and Irish landscapes throb and shine. What I admire most about his work is the way he finds for all this multitudinous, kinetic, dazzling life an answerable style – a language not only lyrical, particular, richly descriptive, but always (and increasingly in the more recent work) informed with philosophical purpose, a purpose that edges effortlessly and unsentimentally into the realm of the spirit, of ‘that which is neither sacred nor profane.’ His poems keep reminding us that ‘the world is a gift.’ It is a gift, however, never to be taken lightly, for it is also, he knows a passing mystery, ‘our soul’s milk and honey.’ In their mixture of observation, contemplation, and invention, as well as in the style Agee fashions for himself by blending American and Irish poetic registers, these poems create their own distinctive space and sound.

Eamon Grennan

Previous review quote:  Chris Agee's careful documentation of nature, his eschewal of cleverness, his poetry's modest refusal to be ‘about’ anything, will not be unfamiliar to reader of American poets such as Charles Wright, Gary Snyder or, most importantly, William Carlos Williams.

Devin Johnston
The Honest Ulsterman