Little Acres by David Feela
Utah’s first Poet Laureate David Lee wrote, “If you want to read a book filled with love, life, and razor wit based on incredible observation and perception, written in some of the sharpest, best-crafted lines you’ll find out there anywhere on the vast horizon of poetry, brimming with the freshest imagery and figurative language you’ve seen in eons, this just might be your lucky day.”
Little Acres is that book -- a chapbook really -- of 40 trim pages, like a small lyrical garden rooted in a sensibility that surrounds everything rural: landscape, trees, birds, animals, flowers, weather, all filtered through an intuitive sensibility, all contributing to the book’s passion for both language and insight. Loosely arranged around a season on a tiny acreage, these poems shape a kind of almanac for living in the natural world. Surprises, pleasures, disappointments, the rich emotions the inhabit the heart. They are carefully crafted poems inhabited by muses, palpable as the sun or the moon, offering readers the experience of understanding a familiar poetic landscape.
Details
Genre: Poetry
ISBN:978-1-947021-87-7
Publication Date: April 16, 2019
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Reviews
In this fine collection, David Feela’s poems lead the reader into a world that is both ordinary and extraordinary. As the poems meander through rural and natural landscapes, they show Feela’s empathy for the small and the neglected, for what has been abandoned and what deserves to be celebrated. Feela has the talent to make empty fields and vacant farmhouses burst with new life. Other poems find beauty and shed light on daily experiences, illuminating human nature with its joys, its failures, and its in-between moments. Like ripples moving outward from the middle of a pond, the poems in Little Acres lead the reader to insights that reach far beyond the poems’ everyday subjects.
--Bill Meissner, author of the poetry books American Compass and The Mapmaker’s Dream and a novel, Spirits in the Grass.
If you are looking for subject-matterless, incoherent, monomaniacal and Narcissistic poetry with little if any appeal to emotion, intellect or lasting aesthetic value other than authorial self-worship, you must put this book down immediately or risk a severe burning of your palms. If you want to read a book filled with love, life, and razor wit based on incredible observation and perception, written in some of the sharpest, best-crafted lines you’ll find out there anywhere on the vast horizon of poetry, brimming with the freshest imagery and figurative language you’ve seen in eons, this just might be your lucky day. It’s been a long time since I said I totally loved the reading of a book of poetry: that dry spell has just ended.
--David Lee, First Poet Laureate of Utah, author of over a dozen collections including the 1999 Pulitzer Prize nominated, News From Down to the Café, recently released, Bluebonnets, Firewheels, and Brown-Eyed Susans, and a forthcoming collection, Mine Tailings.