Shadeland

by Andrew Grace

Shadeland is not only the name of the Illinois farm on which poet Andrew Grace was raised, it is also that elusive space where language attempts to recover all that has been lost. Deeply concerned with the state of today's rural spaces, Grace’s poems describe a landscape and a lifestyle that are both eroding. Stylistically rangy, yet united by an ardent eye for intricate imagery, Shadeland features allusions and influences as classical as Homer, Virgil, and Hopkins while still exhibiting a poetic sensibility that is thoroughly contemporary. Employing a blend of baroque and innovative language, these 21st-century pastorals and anti-pastorals both celebrate and elegize the buckshot-peppered silos and unstill cornfields that are quietly vanishing from the countryside.

Genres: Poetry

62 pages, Paperback

First published December 22, 2008

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found Shadeland painful to read, and it is excellent. My reasons for this are personal. Grace writes with intelligence around living in the rural Midwest in ways that I found resonant. But my favorite line is the moment where he lets his guard down, where he removes poise and bares all in “At the Shade House”: “You were empty. / I was too smart to be a farmer. I would be / an inscrutable man.” My partner also grew up in this environment (Petersburg), and they lucked out from a mixture of loving and accepting parents and the gift of intellect. But every time I visit downstate I recoil from the madness I imagine having to live in this environment. To see beauty instead, like it is in Shadeland, is challenging. I think it requires a reframing. This collection does it, honestly and thoughtfully. I’ve seen the world that Grace describes, and lived it in a different way in Minnesota. But to capture the beauty of it, which is there, is another challenge entirely. Shadeland is a gift!

[Andy Stallings · Rating 1 out of 5]

I felt this book was mediocre from beginning to end. Until the very last pages of the book, no poems caught my attention beyond the reading of their lines. The poem that did stand out, "For Tityrus," was a good read, but even so, of a type that I find suspect in general -- historical reference as model for present life. Lesser moments included a poem about a Grant Wood painting, a pair of rather dull sonnets, and some square-shaped linked stanzas about amaryllis. Even lesser was a pair of poems beginning with lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins, in which the Hopkins lines significantly exceeded the original material.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poems in this book seem most engaged when they are working with a narrative that reveals the speaker's intense relationship with the land, or home. I'm thinking especially of "At the Shade House" or "Achilles in the Heartland." These, for me, bring me closest to the sentiment Grace maintains as the foundation of every one of his poems.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Footprints arrow and meander: this may not be the way,
yet how else to know but take a stormtrue doubt with you, step
into the cold stream, how else to know but through?"

-- At the Outermost Shrine of the Narrowmost Road

[Dana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read my review of Shadeland .