This and all other MotesBooks titles are available from YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE or on Powells.com, Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and other online sources. |
| fiction non-fiction memoir poetry |
| "Adam blamed Eve. Eve blamed the snake. The snake didn't have a leg to stand on." |
back to ...
| Praise for AFTER THE GARDEN |
| “I see the circle of earth/gathered in a cotton dress” ends the stunning poem “First Fruits.” And everywhere in this fine collection, Charles Swanson gathers in for his lucky readers the things of this world he refuses to let go. Through poems as heartfelt as they are intelligent, the reader enters with him a distant land—“something akin to Eden”—a land, Swanson reminds us again and again, for which we continue to long. Swanson’s voice is as at home with the lyric as with the narrative, as skillful with free verse as with form. Here is a poet who revisits the music and wisdom of the Psalms with a contemporary eye and a masterful hand. After the Garden is a triumphant first collection. – Cathy Smith Bowers, author of A Book of Minutes Charles Swanson’s daily life as nurturer of a family, a small farm, a Baptist congregation and a high school classroom is refracted into poetry in After the Garden: Selected Responses to the Psalms. Readers can appreciate these accessible, thought-provoking glances at life, whether or not they triangulate them with the Psalms for additional layers of meaning. They will delight in the sly yet wise juxtapositions of ice-covered trees with osteoporosis, chaos with infinite grace, or the continent with contented space. Boyhood on a small farm provides the recurring center of this poetry, though it ranges to encompass Flannery O’Connor, Johnny Appleseed, Olaudah Equiano and even a stylist proposing a makeover of Jesus. The last line of the last poem,“we go out to feed the present or the future,” sums up the nurturing spirit of this poetry and the enticing prospect it affords the reader. – George Brosi, editor of Appalachian Heritage The comfort of home and farm, mother and grandmother, fills these poems. Among the lasting images is a mother nurturing her son’s fantasy by allowing him to drive his toy cars on “porcelain roads” around the eyes of the stove. Another is the loving ritual of a grandmother washing a small boy’s dirty feet at day’s end. Yet, Charles Swanson does not shy from the pain of labor, the anguish of loss, nor the ravage of time, as evidenced by the poignant description of a grandfather’s last harvest of bronzed pumpkins with son and grandson as field hands. Earth colors and life stabilizers anchor the collection, starting with the rich red of tomatoes – and God – and ending with the welcome spring sign of creasy greens – and Mother. – Grace Toney Edwards, co-editor of A Handbook to Appalachia |
The poems in Charles Swanson’s After the Garden: Selected Responses to the Psalms take us back to the true roots of poetry, to its source in prayer, music and the lives of ordinary people who struggle to make sure that the ones who come after them are able to live lives of freedom, hope and faith. In these beautifully-shaped poems about growing up and living in the Virginia Piedmont and Appalachia, Swanson turns ordinary lives into extraordinary prayers. From the first poem to the last, the reader, whether he is a lover of poetry or one who seldom turns to it, will find poems that move and inspire. – John Guzlowski, author of Lightning and Ashes “This old Bible,” Emerson wrote in his Journal (1842), “if you pitch it out the window with a fork, it comes back bounce again,” as has happened in TV evangelism. In literature it remains largely missing with, among others, these exceptions: Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Penn Warren, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Charles Swanson in After the Garden. Here the old shadows in “God-Talk” are present and accounted for, still looming over the land, still disturbing, always teaching. – Robert J. Higgs, author of God in the Stadium: Sports and Religion in America |
| Praise for AFTER THE GARDEN |
| Charles A. Swanson grew up on a farm, and still lives with his wife on what his family would call a “postage stamp” farm at the foot of Turkeycock Mountain in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, not far from the home of his paternal ancestors. He has a love for the things of the earth, and he believes in both a sustainable agriculture and a sustainable faith. His poems and short fiction have appeared in journals and publications throughout the Appalachian region. Teacher of the Year at Gretna High School in 2007-2008, he instructs students in Creative Writing, dual enrollment English and AP English, and he pastors Melville Avenue Baptist Church in Danville. |
| Swanson has won the James Still Award for Poetry (2005), among other honors, and has a chapbook of poems, Farm Life and Legend, due for release by Finishing Line Press in late 2009. His book After The Garden: Selected Responses to the Psalms was published by MotesBooks in 2009. |
With engaging frankness shooting through unexpectedly
to keep this Psalm-related collection from falling too far
into seriousness, poet Charles A. Swanson provides a
healthy take on religion that is diverse, human and often
even messy.
AFTER THE GARDEN: SELECTED RESPONSES TO THE
PSALMS holds poems that are rich in imagery, deep
in metaphor and populated with vivid characters ...
a preacher mourning his torched church, a longing
farmwife endlessly grading tobacco, a boy who hides
behind the stove when he knows he's been naughty, a
mother who stains her dress helping her father-in-law
gather from his garden. There is humor, too, bringing
essential and startling variety to this collection.
AFTER THE GARDEN journeys into the heart, the head,
the groin of the individual before his maker. These poems,
like the Psalms themselves, are full of questions: Where is
God in pain, in loss, in drought, in family history? This is a
book neither of paraphrases nor of praises, though a
sense of thanksgiving breathes throughout. This is not a
book of easy answers to tough questions. It is a search
within the journey, a search through which the person
seeking God can find his or her own struggle mirrored in
the lines of these modern poems.
to keep this Psalm-related collection from falling too far
into seriousness, poet Charles A. Swanson provides a
healthy take on religion that is diverse, human and often
even messy.
AFTER THE GARDEN: SELECTED RESPONSES TO THE
PSALMS holds poems that are rich in imagery, deep
in metaphor and populated with vivid characters ...
a preacher mourning his torched church, a longing
farmwife endlessly grading tobacco, a boy who hides
behind the stove when he knows he's been naughty, a
mother who stains her dress helping her father-in-law
gather from his garden. There is humor, too, bringing
essential and startling variety to this collection.
AFTER THE GARDEN journeys into the heart, the head,
the groin of the individual before his maker. These poems,
like the Psalms themselves, are full of questions: Where is
God in pain, in loss, in drought, in family history? This is a
book neither of paraphrases nor of praises, though a
sense of thanksgiving breathes throughout. This is not a
book of easy answers to tough questions. It is a search
within the journey, a search through which the person
seeking God can find his or her own struggle mirrored in
the lines of these modern poems.
ISBN 978-1-934894-23-1 poetry 92 pages |
an excerpt from AFTER THE GARDEN ... "May he remember all your offerings ..." Psalm 20:3 First Fruits Though this is a love story, it is not promiscuous. Quick exits from Cumberland on Friday evenings after father’s work day said how much he loved the southern home six hours away, the red clay fields, the tobacco and sunshine ripening the summer air, breathing warmth toward winter. All this in his look, in his faraway eyes, that would fix the highway like some unthinkable thing that had to be crossed, black tar a blankness for spelling memories during the dark course of the evening drive. Starting early one autumn, we arrived at the ridge when daylight hung like scroll work on the old tobacco barn. Bats were beginning to loop, but white moths had sun still in the silk they left on my fingers. That was the first time I felt the greeting: something beyond hugs, kisses, warmth of words. An invitation from Granddad to my mother to see his cucumber patch upslope from the barn. Above the old tobacco beds where young plants had been drawn to set the now maturing fields. She didn’t have a sack, The car was empty of bucket, poke, and bag, nothing to gather cucumbers but the old tin can smelling of rust and emergency stops. It represented haste, not the destination. It would not do. So Mama took herself, dressed as she was, while Granddad guided her past decaying logs that once elevated cloth, cloth mesh like milkweed fluff over spring seedlings the size of ticks, but now lay like logs of crocodiles waiting in waist-high weeds, late summer’s neglected jungle. Not quite sure, about the attraction of a rocky hillside, of weeds and waste, I watched them. Watched with shadows coming down. Granddad stooped and handed green sticks to Mama who bunched her skirt, gathered its pleats in one schooled hand, and filled the cloth with fruit. They stumbled back to the car, tripping in morning glory vines, overgrown fescue, lespedeza, Mama with her skirt, the circle of the earth, gathered to make a poke. Cucumbers tumbled free when she released the hem. We stacked them, plantbed logs in the floorboard of the Ford. Mama fussed about the marks where the fresh-plucked stems had bled against the cloth. Washings never released the stains of cucumbers, nor miles the sight of earth’s long jewels brought to the car in a cotton dress, nor years the smile on Granddad’s face. With twilight we drifted down the ridge side, under fireflies and starfields to the home house by the creek. Night sang, frogs sang, as we lugged love’s labor, green cucumbers, to the kitchen table. Fields and houses, kitchen tables, change, weeds grow beyond bounds, she is older than he, and he is gone. But we talk of her father-in-law, my grandfather. Reared back beside her kitchen table, sipping coffee, I see his love of growing things, I hear her honor his life, I see why I grapple with weeds through the sweat of summer, I see the circle of the earth gathered in a cotton dress. -- Charles A. Swanson from AFTER THE GARDEN : Selected Responses to the Psalms (MotesBooks, 2009) |
(c) 2012
