Saturday Review: “Scripture of Exile and Return” a review by Robert M. West of Jeffery Beam’s Verdant (2022) in NCLR Online Spring 2025.
Robert M. West reviews this recent collection of Beam’s poetry, talking about the inspiration behind it. According to West, “At the heart of the book is a sequence of twenty-six untitled poems based on the poet’s struggle with the end of an affair. The affair and the agony that followed took place in the mid-’90s…. In the substantial essay with which he ends the book, Beam explains how that experience led to these poems.”
In addition to the poetry itself, West remarks on the paratext and essays added to Verdant. He writes, “My own view is that all the paratext gives Beam’s book a fascinating kaleidoscopic quality, and the details of the sequence’s origin both illuminate its literary genealogy and underscore the achievement of deep anguish’s transformation into art.” Much like Eliot’s The Wasteland, the extra information is somehow extraneous and indelible to the the art itself.
Read the entire review here! And order the book from Bookshop.org.
