Congratulations to all involved! I look forward to reading these poems.

Jeff

I squinted and read "First Light"; quite lovely! congrats to all involved. Dee

Wow! The cover is spectacular, and I look forward to reading your poems, Wiley! Hearty congratulations!

Bear, fabulous design, lettering, and art! Totally impressive.

Terese

Thanks, Jennifer, Jeff, Dee and Terese:

I am greatly pleased with the way Robt managed two of my shots of the Susquehanna for the jacket. The background scene is of the river above the Lewisburg bridge. The framed inset shows some of our older houses as seen from the bridge. In the center, the simple house of beige stone dates from c. 1734, while the white one at right is nearly as old and now belongs to the chairman of the Bucknell Univ. English faculty, who is also book reviewer for our local daily paper. The spire at left is that of the First Baptist Church where Robert Lowry, author and composer of "Shall We Gather at the River" was pastor for many years. Inside the book Jeanette Campbell has made a line drawing of about the same scene to illustrate my sonnet: "At the River," which was inspired by Lowry's hymn.

All your kind comments are much appreciated.

G/W

Congratulations -- it looks beautiful!

Sally

The ISBN# is 1593860242 - but Amazon's telling me it's not available yet. Robt, get that wonderful image thumbnailed on Amazon. Congratulations to Wiley - the commentary on the book is great.

Frank

I have now carefully read through Yesterday, or Long Ago, and I cannot commend it highly enough to our members. Understand this is Wiley Clements, and you will be stepping back into a sequence of lyrics which celebrate traditional values, redolant at times of magnolias, poems which employ inversion and the subjunctive with equal ease. You will be struck by how many of these verses were workshopped rather recently at the Deep End. Like David Anthony or Oliver Murray, Wiley has plunged back into verse after a long hiatus. The winged chariot is hurrying nearer Wiley than those young (!) poets. I occasionally have the sense that some of the newest poems were committed to flesh out this large book with undue haste. But 35 years his junior, I have world enough and time. The overwhelming sense of the book, though, reflects Dick Davis' comment on Cavafy at Alicia's Cavafyesque thread at Mastery, where Dick talks about the sweetest poetic sensibility among modern masters. Wiley's book can be infinitely hard-nosed, but it evokes with heart-rending accuracy a civility whose passing he laments in the high, elegiac fashion this lifelong student of poetry has made his own.

Gracious, Tim! What a generous appraisal. I had to go look through the book again to see whether I could find any of those qualities you attribute to it. I did find six occurrences of the subjunctive mood: 5 be's and a were. No actual magnolias, though.

You are right that a couple of the smaller pieces were dashed off at the last moment without time for proper maturation. Robt and I wanted to get the book ready in time for him to take a copy to West Chester. Several other of the poems were written earlier this year, but the great majority go much farther back, as much as fifty years.

If Clock and Rose Press had a subscription salesman with your descriptive gifts, they might hope to break even on this book.

Many thanks...

Wiley

Wiley,

You got more subjunctives than that. I know you do. Don't argue. Let us now praise subjunctive men, dude.

Break even? 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be pursued... But we are not counting on it.

Bask in the glory old man, and work on the "Collected"...

(robt)

Alan, Tim, Mike Juster, Paul Lake, and Sam are all members of the West Chester Gun and Couplet Club, but we are also all members of The Committee to Preserve the Subjunctive, an august body into which Wiley has just been inducted.