Dawn Night Fall

Dawn Night Fall,
by Gordon Grigsby                            


In  lines  that  are  taut,  lean  and  lucid,  Gordon  Grigsby’s  poems  embody  the substrate and the epic story of the world from which we came and in which we now  struggle  to  survive.  This  is  a  necessary,  indeed  an    essential  book  for  our time.  —Ernest  Lockridge’s  most  recent  book:  Skeleton  Key  to  the  Suicide  of  My Father Ross Lockridge, Jr, author of Raintree County  

In poem after piercing poem—“The Light Here,” “An Ocean Sound,” “Nancy’s Sandwich Shop Heightened Consciousness”—Grigsby weaves our intense human moments of love, sorrow, or joy into the beauty and grandeur of our indifferent earth. The art of his vision is unique and invaluable. —Julian Markels, author of The Marxian Imagination   

Like James Wright before him, Gordon Grigsby is an essential Mid-Western poet, a hard-scrabbled farmer of words, a steel-worker tending to the furnaces of an imagination that flares in darkness: "the praised madness that trembles the air." The geography of Ohio, the names of its vanished Indian tribes, the smell of a dead  child  and  the  poisoned  rain,  are  here  given  their  full  measure  of  terrible beauty. —Michael Salcman, author of The Clock Made of Confetti and The Enemy of Good Is Better 

Dawn Night Fall explores the interplay between sorrow and hope, tragic realities and  the  mind’s  freedom,  through  startlingly  original  images  and  ideas.   As in Walden, Grigsby uses his house on a small river in Mt. Air, Ohio as a way into the  natural  world,  ancient  and  personal  history,  world  travels,  and  complex combinations  of  pain  and  luminosity:  ashes  of  a  premature  baby,  woman  and children waiting in corrugated tin shanties, a loved father lonely in Sun City, the glow of needles on a forest floor, streetlamp glint on everyone’s hair.  Readers are richly  rewarded  for  his  extraordinary  vision.  —Jan  Schmittauer,  Associate Professor, Ohio University

These are wise, beautiful poems of love and loss, an elegiac celebration of our brief moments in human history and the natural world. No leaf, no strand of seaweed is too small to escape Grigsby’s tender attention, as he recalls places and people who spring brilliantly to life through his words. —Donna Spector, author of The Woman Who Married Herself

Gordon Grigsby’s poems are wonderfully attuned to his world, his time—to our world, our time. His work powerfully evokes how he and we experience “double living,” always “stepping twice in the same river.” The history he thus calls up is ancient, recent, and contemporary. And it is universal (through the particular, as in “Hotel on the Cliff at Delphi, November 2002”), cultural (as in “The Hurricane, Robin Hood, and the Bounty,” where we get an ode to Jon Hall, Errol Flynn, and Clark Gable), and intensely personal (as in the past life and relationships brought out in poems like “The Vanished Motel”). Dawn Night Fall is a deeply moving collection. —Morris Beja, author of James Joyce: A Literary Life and Tell Us About . . . A Memoir.