Winner of the eighth annual Arkansas Poetry Award, Martin Lammon writes poems that deal fearlessly and directly with their subjects. Tenderness, complexity, compassion, reverence, and condemnation are all within his range.
Writing of love, he can speak broadly and universally of the heart, yet in the same poem, he can intricately describe a woman’s hand, a fire on a beach, or the hollows around a lover’s eye. Even when he works in the voice of a suicide, his precision can be devastating, as in these lines: “When you lie beside me under stars, each needlepoint / of light pricks my bare arms.”
With equal ease, Lammon travels across miles, cultures, and time, writing of kilns and potters in Japan, long-dead Eskimos in Alaska, or Blue Hole Cave in Pennsylvania.
Full of grace and candor, these poems pursue the stories that shimmer behind the day’s headlines, seeking the spirit at stake in the “lives beside [our] own whose secrets are worth loving.”
Martin Lammon edited Written in Water, Written in Stone: Twenty Years of Poets on Poetry. His poems have appeared in many journals, including Ploughshares and the Gettysburg Review, and were chosen by W. S. Merwin as winner of a Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. He holds the Callaway/ Flannery O’Connor Chair in Creative Writing at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville.
“The authenticity of feeling, the feelings themselves and the subjects from which they arise, the honesty with which [Martin Lammon] confronts the pain of existence and the consequences of our mortal damage and liability, the evanescence of what we love, our implications in the losses we live through, and the chord of mixed feelings that is the bass accompaniment of our survival are all there, and constantly there in his work.”
—W. S. Merwin
“The poems in News from Where I Live are informed by a gratitude, a humility, and an intelligence that are heart-felt—and by a wealth of stories whose secrets Martin Lammon has felt in his bones, then translated into keen and lucid language.”
—Margaret Gibson
“What I value more than anything else in a poet is how his poems convince me that the voice I hear in them is his true voice—not a voice he assumes for the occasion, not a voice he feigns, not a voice with echoes in it. Whether Martin Lammon is writing about West Virginia, Ohio, or Japan, he always seems to be confiding in us rather than merely addressing us. That’s his gift. And it’s invaluable because it permits us to trust not only the poems but the man who wrote them.”
—Samuel Hazo
“The poetry of Martin Lammon will open your heart. News from Where I Live contains many love poems, tender moments of remembrance and innocence. What I like about Lammon’s work is its feel, the softness of lines that also hold firm. I like the hidden presence of God in some of his poetry. Lammon also connects himself to the earth; his geography is filled with hills and streams. This new collection of poems is not simply worthy of a prize—it’s a reason for celebration.”
—E. Ethelbert Miller
