Merciful Days

by Jesse Graves

In language both plainspoken and lyrical, East Tennessee poet Jesse Graves examines the connections that hold people together across generations and against the breaches of time and distance. The landscapes of his native region possess a mythic beauty and Graves writes of the animating force it can become in a poet's imagination. Graves's poems are haunted by the lost futures of lives cut short and by speculative narrations of omens and portents. For all the darkness visible in the world, Graves elevates the great joy of feeding birds, walking in the woods, and sharing a life, sometimes only in memory, with the people we love. Those who have passed on are remembered here and their stories become a source of light. The new work in MERCIFUL DAYS will remind readers why Ron Rash has said, These poems have the music, wisdom, and singular voice of a talent fully realized, and make abundantly clear that Jesse Graves is one of America's finest young poets.

Genres: Poetry

57 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2020

Reviews

[Charles White · Rating 5 out of 5]

I believe this is Graves finest poetry collection to date, which is significant considering I think he is the premier poet of the American South today. These poems penetrate the idiom of personal and family history in such a way that it transcends the qualities typically seen in nature poetry. Instead, these territories inform a changing inner landscape that deals with loss, memory, mortality, and fate in an unflinching yet generous voice. I recommend this collection in the highest possible terms.

[Denton · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his third solo poetry collection, Merciful Days, Jesse Graves returns to the East Tennessee farm of his youth. The land Graves writes about is also his ancestral home. Sense of place is almost a requirement for Tennessee writers, but Graves’ abiding connection to place gives exquisite life and meaning to his work. Many poems center around the loss of the author’s father and brother. Those poems are poignant in their own right, but they speak to a larger theme that flows throughout the collection: that we as individuals are only a fleeting part of something much larger and more mysterious than we can fully comprehend. This idea is evident in “Mossy Springs” where the narrator revisits a watering hole on the family farm:

…you wonder at the bloodlines
that drank here before you,
dating as far back as time records.

Hunters from the original tribes,
trackers chasing game upstream,
farmers drawn over from the fields,

and now you, looking for the lost
kingdom of your ancestors,
their eternal thirst to be found.

For Graves, this big examination of generations extending “as far back as time records” is inseparable from his own personal experience. His life is tied to the past in ways that are not completely understood even though they are tangibly felt. “Come Running” depicts this, and it is perhaps my favorite poem in this collection:
Come Running

They amble across the field, drawn to shade,
sniffing for uncropped clover and sprout,
their slowness measurable by galactic tilt.
From a distance the calves look identical,
but watch closely, and the shadings around
white faces range from salmon to maroon,
and the little curls on their foreheads
twist in tighter and looser tangles.
If a baby separates from its mother,
she calls for it like a foghorn, the lowing
anyone can tell means “find me now.”
But listen closer, and a mother can signal
her child with the slightest grunt
from the other side of the field—
no other calf will move or even look up,
yet one comes running, summoned home.

In many ways, Merciful Days is simply about the idea of memory—how memory keeps the past connected to the present and the future, and how memory sustains us through loss and sadness. Merciful Days is an elegy, but it’s not a dirge. These poems are full of joyous moments, as well as of the deepest sense of love, the kind that only expands and grows.

[Michael Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful. Just beautiful. And stunning. Reading Graves's MERCIFUL DAYS has hollowed me out and then filled the space with memories that at once are not mine and yet somehow enrich mine.

[Spence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Channeling past and prophesying future, this collection evokes every feeling about the passage of the time one can think of. A beautiful collection.

[Melissa Helton · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who has lost a father, and someone currently sifting through heritage and genealogy, and looking for what that means for us as we move into a future without these people, I connected strongly to the poems. Beautiful collection.

[Anna Stowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably my favorite poetry book at this point. Definitely recommend.

[Lisa Livesay · Rating 5 out of 5]

This volume of Jesse Graves' poetry reads like a memoir and an elegy to his family and past: Memories from childhood, reflections on how his life was touched by the natural and pastoral worlds around him, and by the people in his life who have since passed on. I think my favorite poem from the collection is "Lisa in the Forest": "Every flash of new color announces itself to her eye, greener green, dirtier brown, full spectrum fanning out like a wild library, each sprig a volume in the catalogue of life." I also loved "October Woods": "The first cold nights have curled the edges of forest floor ginger, rouged the sumac and sugar maples... Turkey-tail fungus fans across the torsos of downed trees, morning frost scintillating it all." Graves is able to simply and elegantly describe natural scenes in a way that awakens all of your senses. I love poetry that makes itself felt.