For immediate release
September 10, 2022
Kira Houston, Outreach Coordinator
828.350.8484 | kira@blackmountaincollege.org

Poetry Reading: Jeffery Beam
Thursday, October 20, 2022 at 7 PM
Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center {120 College Street}
Reminiscent of Eastern Bhakti love poetry, and Western Troubadour and Green Man traditions, Verdant recounts a mid-life passage within a shadowed natural landscape of intense physical and spiritual longing.
What could be more important than a love poem? These by Jeffery Beam are gorgeous, rich, and wise. I’m reminded how the thinnest membrane separates rapture from heartbreak, how both the human realm and the insect kingdom are awash with love. Beam’s poems flicker between Mirabai and the evening cricket, between Rilke and the night-clad firefly. Look close. Look close again!
As in the best wisdom literature, these are poems where opposites are reconciled; light and dark unite while presence and absence become one. Here, we are often in the liminal space of evening, where we are called to see “things that escape/ strong long-sighted people.” Above all, these are poems of tenderness and hope, and we are assured that all those who share our grief are “knitting the holes with their loves.” “Listen!” the speaker exhorts us, and we know we will hear what we most need to hear.

He is the author of Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements, a collaboration with Welsh painter Clive Hicks-Jenkins (Kin Press, 2019); the online chapbook Don’t Forget Love (2018, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars); Beam co-edited The Lord of Orchards: Jonathan Williams at 80 — a Jonathan Williams online feature (with Richard Owens) in 2009 for Jacket magazine which led in 2018 to an expanded book Jonathan Williams: The Lord of Orchards (Prospecta Press); and many more.