A career-spanning volume drawn from forty years of work and a selection of new poems.
Stephen Coreyâs work is intelligent, moving and engaging. Poem after poem is beautiful, effortless, and thought-provoking. The range of style and subject matter, the depth of thought and emotion, the elegance and resonance and simplicity of language, the affectionate voice and toneâ"all work to make this a truly important and memorable book.
âHere is a life, and a life, and / a life,â Stephen Corey writes in the opening poemâs instructions to on how find the faded leafâ"also a metaphor for the end of lifeâ"that one must imagine still colored after he is âgone.â The poem is echoed near the end of this stunningly rich and encompassing book in a poem addressed to his four daughters about what he has missed during his life. In between we encounter a world we thought we knew but have not seen in this way before: things as varied as Monarch butterflies, telephones, calligraphy, and bread, as well as other writers and texts that become lenses to show us âHow we are growing undoes what we areâ and see.
Like the glassblowerâs art in one of these major poems, âBreath makes another world.â And like his Michelangelo in a sequence that masterfully covers centuries, we see âthe way a life we love can be steered, / beyond our control, beyond us.â And so, thanks to this important and needed book we too can live beyond ourselves; that, indeed, is the highest praise for any art.â
â"Richard Jackson, author of Broken Horizons and Where the Wind Comes From
âStephen Coreyâs, As My Age Then Was, So I Understood Them, is sometimes bookish, in the best ways, and in addition to welcoming many of the stars in our pantheon (Shakespeare, OâKeeffe, Keats, Ginsberg, Woolf, and Whitman for example) thereâs also the dual elegy for the poetâs father and Dickinson (the latter also has her own baseball poem), Emerson âat the moment of his first masturbation,â and a sequence in which Li Po and Tu Fu hop on a jet and tour America. What this means is that when Corey forays into âthe real worldâ â"keeping a hospital death watch, exploring and exalting carnal love, or delighting in his young daughter âplaying Beethoven on my chestâ â" the poems are informed by both of his masters⦠by the âshelves of booksâ that are âthe bones of my brain.ââ
â"Albert Goldbarth
Stephen Corey worked at the Georgia Review for thirty-six years in various positions including thirteen year as Editor before retiring in 2019. His first two poetry collections, The Last Magician (Water Mark Press, 1981) and Synchronized Swimming (Swallowâs Tale Press, 1984), were winners of national competitions. All These Lands You Call One Country (University of Missouri Press, 1992) and There Is No Finished World (White Pine Press, 2003) followed, and a half-dozen poetry chapbooks were interspersed along the way. His first prose collection was Startled at the Big Sound: Essays Personal, Literary, and Cultural (Mercer University Press, 2017), and a second is in process.
