Dirt and All Its Dense Labor, Poems by Gabriel Welsch
Gabriel
Welsch is a poet with a deep knowledge of the earth, of its secret inner
workings, of what lives beneath the dirt and what grows above. The artfully
sculpted poems of Dirt and All Its Dense Labor exhibit that knowledge
and honor its subject.
Sample Poems by Gabriel Welsch
"Like Swedish botanist Linnaeus, who makes several appearances here, Gabriel Welsch observes and listens for 'the minute stutter of biology,' fashioning with a joyful lyricism 'stories/that mortar the edges.' Welsch attends equally to the demotic--'the coiled hose, //the mailbox flag, the forsythia clutched in English ivy'--and the speculative 'high-ribbed leaves of heaven.' Speaking as brother, citizen, father, and gardener, Welsch's narrators deploy a range of prosodic techniques in original meditations on community, family, place. Superb homages to Bishop, O'Hara, and Merwin establish a lineage for this poet whose craft and erudition earn him a place among our most gifted newcomers."--Robin Becker
"At the heart of Gabriel Welsch's marvelous debut collection is earth's urgent command--as Rilke puts it--for transformation. To the wondrous and fearsome cycles of bud, blossom, and decay, Welsch brings to bear not just his horticulturists's eye for lavish beauty but also a scientist's precision for uncovering what moves darkly beneath the surface of things. Reading these poems is to experience how language in the hands of a masterful poet can find root and tendril itself into art: 'In this way, / syllables blossom, the names lose / their context of weeds, keep the color / slipped from the sun.'"--Richard Foerster
Gabriel Welsch is a former garden designer and nurseryman. His poems, stories, essays and reviews have appeared in dozens of magazines and journals, including Mid-American Review, Harvard Review, New Letters, Missouri Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Georgia Review, Ascent, Chautauqua Literary Journal, and Rapportage. In 2003, he received a Pennsylvania Arts Council Individual Artist’s Fellowship for Fiction, and in 2002 was the inaugural Thoreau Poet in Residence at the Toledo Botanical Garden. He lives in State College, PA, with his wife, Jill, and daughter, Bella, and works at Penn State (where he earned an MFA in 1998) in alumni relations and development for the College of the Liberal Arts.
ISBN: 1933456329, 80 pages, $17.00
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