The Eighth Day collects poems from two previous Dryad Press volumes and includes work that ranges between the comedic and numinous. "These poems run the necessary risks and win them all - feeling without sentimentality, gentleness without softness, and of startling without blinding or terrifying. Rod Jellema sees the strange in the ordinary . . . his technique is economical, exact, understated."

Alberta Turner Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland, where he founded and directed the creative writing program, Rod Jellema is the author of four books of poetry (three from Dryad Press), the most recent, A Slender Grace. He's published two books of poetry in translation. Jellemaâs work has won him a Hart Crane Award, one prize and two writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, several residency fellowships from Yaddo, and the Pieter Jelles Prize (Friesland) and a Columbia University Translation Prize for his translations of Frisian poetry. Jellema and his wife, the writer Michele Orwin, divide their time between Washington, DC, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the Lake Michigan dunelands near Montague, Michigan. Because I Never Learned the Names of Flowers It is moonlight and white where

I slink away from my cat-quiet blue rubber truck

and motion myself to back it up to your ear.

I peel back the doors of the van and begin

to hushload into your sleep

the whole damn botanical cargo of Spring. Sleeper, I whisk you

Trivia and Illium, Sweet Peristalsis, Flowering Delirium. Sprigs of Purple Persiflage and Loversâ Leap, slips

of Hysteria sticks in my hair. I gather clumps of Timex,

handfuls of Buttertongues, Belly buttons, and Bluelets. I come with Trailing Nebula, I come with Late-Blooming

Paradox, with Creeping Pyromania, Pink Apoplex

and Climbing Solar Plexus, whispering: Needlenose,

Juice Cup, Godstem, Nexus, Sex-us, Condominium.

The Eighth Day:

New & Selected Poems

Rod Jellema 120 pp., 6 x 9 Cloth, $15

ISBN 0-931848-60-1 Paper(sew-wrap), $10

0-931848-61-x Free Shipping

Editions Cloth $15.00 USD Paper $10.00 USD

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