The Lord and the General Din of the World

The confessional, lyric poems in Mead's stark, commanding first collection were selected by Philip Levine for the 1995 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. Mead combines flinty honesty with an organic intellect (as when she arches the work of Bach and Van Gogh over transcendent moments in daily life). She employs taut, colloquial language and firmly places her personal history against a searching, almost existential understanding of the world-even at its most difficult. Many of these powerful, subtle poems concern her father's heroin addiction, focusing on how that life changes, or skews, what it means to be human. Mead pinpoints, and gives form to, tenuous, seemingly nameless emotions ("Somewhere there should be a place/ the exact shape of my emptiness-/ there should be a place/ responsible for taking one back"). That precision gives her poetry, though often spawned of rough subject-matter (addiction, abuse, suicide and profound isolation), the power of expertly cut gems.
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"It is rare to find poetry so determined to cast aside the notion of comfort through faith, yet so successful at conveying the fragility and fortitude of the human soul. . . . Mixing prayer and trouble, high art and fractured lives, these poems teeter brilliantly, frighteningly, away from the pastoral and toward the abyss." -- Boston Review

"Mead's thematic concerns . . . are ambitious, and her language more than lives up to the project. Indeed, Mead-s language is so freshly constructed, so nervy, that she is able to transform topics that may seem merely sensational in the hands of a lesser poet-for example, drug addiction-into art. . . . Jane Mead proves herself to be an exceedingly lucent and thought-provoking lyric poet." -- The Gettysburg Review

"The feel of Mead's writing is relatively simple and open, both in its textures and in its emotional vulnerability. And her writing is full of surprise, twists on 'reality', moments when what we might call the face of things enters the text, grimaces or winks." -- Poetry Flash

Jane Mead was educated at Vassar College, Syracuse University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and has taught at several schools in the San Francisco Bay area, at Colby College and in the Iowa Summer Writing festival. In 1991, State Street Press published her long poem, "A Truck Marked Flammable" as a chapbook. Her individual poems have been widely published in such places as The New York Times, Best American Poetry of 1990, American Poetry Review, The Virginia Quarterly, Ploughshares and The Antioch Review. In 1992, she received a Whiting Writers' Award.

"There is a mood-connected to solitude-that is not loneliness and not despair, but that feels like it could turn into either if you did not try to love the world, or at least look at it attentively. This book seems written from that place. It's a book to be read slowly and quietly, if you are to feel your way into its deep sadness and its small, sudden well of joy.-

Poem by Jane Mead:

To the Body

I don't know how to speak to you. I have tried and tried, but I don't know how to answer.

I gave you tide pools for your feet, salt on wind for your lips and the sound of waves for your ears:

Nothing.

I made you stare through the arch of a window where Simon left his body hanging: Nothing, not a tremor.

I tried the junkie's twilight sleep, but you would not come with me. I climbed the stairs in a house by the sea.

Climbed past the porthole on the landing, the tailless lizard in the corner, and let the stranger's hands massage you.

I forgot myself and let her have you. These things I did for you because of what I know: there is no easy truce of words forthcoming.

And you pushed the clear tears out- they dripped down the bench to the carpet they kept on coming-as if I'd understand.

As if I'd understand or could go with you.