Saturday Review: “‘How else not be lost,'” a review by Robert M. West of James Seay’s Come! Come! Where? Where? (2024), forthcoming in NCLR Online Fall 2024 (coming out next week!)
After a lifetime of writing poetry, James Seay delivers his first collection of essays which, according to Robert M. West, depict a “multifaceted portrait of the author and a great deal of pleasure and wisdom.” Now into his eighties, Seay highlights wisdom gained from a vast array of lived experiences. West remarks, “As varied as these essays are – and they’re quite wide-ranging in their subject matter – they achieve an admirable unity in large part due to that consistency of voice.”
Seay’s essays examine the pains and pleasures of the human experience, and West emphasizes the importance in sharing such observations: “We need to tell and hear such narratives . . . to cope with life’s overabundance of pain and loss. To quote the rhetorical question with which [Seay] closes [one] essay, ‘How else not be lost in weeping for the hurt and the too-soon gone?’” (21). Although Seay’s book tackles some dark themes, West assures that “Come! Come! Where? Where? isn’t a sad book, even when it does deal with sadness: it’s genuinely as life-affirming as the sparrow song translated by its title.” “Seay can draw in a reader and keep them spellbound” and “Unlike many poets’ essay collections, this is a book of personal essays, not exercises in literary criticism, and so its cohesiveness also has much to do with the running backdrop of the author’s life history. One could almost approach it as a highly episodic, highly selective, out-of-sequence autobiography.”
Read the entire review here while you wait for the release of NCLR Online Fall 2024 later this month! And buy the book from your local independent bookstore, or order it from UNC Press.
