Field Recordings

Rod Jellema, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, has released a collection of poetry that distills his 40 year career into  Incarnality , an embodiment of physically and spiritually gifted poems that tug against each other, jostling for an one up on the other.   Incarnality  isn’t a typical collection, nor a collected, but rather new married with older work creating a thematic arc stretching back to the poet's youth, and ahead towards future selves. In many ways  Incarnality  is a self affirmation of the poet’s voice and craft, and of mankind and our clumsy fumbling about in the world as we try to transcend flesh. It’s a book that longs for spiritual grace and finds it in the physical, carnal world, and it’s that tension between the earthiness of experience and the transcendence of the spirit that give Jellema's poems wings.   In “Reading Faces” the speaker recalls on a snowy travel worn night, his father who worked with drunks, who ...