A garden in Kentucky

the long version

In this collection Jane Gentry evokes, in images as haunting as the Kentucky landscape, a garden thriving with the flowers of memory, a physical world that reflects a realm of transcendence. Cosmic harmony reveals itself in the "ciphers" of roots and worms, in a piece of blue-willow china - "a blaze of balance, of wholeness" - that survives a fire in which a lonely, tormented cousin died. Like John Donne and Elizabeth Bishop, Gentry finds beauty, grandeur, and the suggestion of immortality in the smallest, most evanescent of details. A mother's clothes. Scents. Textures. The play of moonlight on rock. The chirp of crickets. A faded tintype of a great-grandfather's dog. The wedding of a drum majorette. A glimpse caught through an open door of a naked woman ironing. A scarecrow. The smell of Bible leather. Laundry drying on a clothesline. Stark, lovely, elegiac, gently surreal, Gentry's poems resonate and echo in the vast spaces of the heart. A Garden in Kentucky is a place of mystery, terror, beauty, and wonder, a garden to which readers will find themselves returning again and again.