| Title | : | I Only Left for Tea: Poems |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1942081006 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781942081005 |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 82 |
| Publication | : | First published August 29, 2014 |
"We return here often," says Al Black in the book's title poem, "to resume mid-sentence our conversation upon my deck." That's the feel of this book, a kind of wide-ranging conversation with a friend. Even as the book teases out in confessional poems the relation between the past and the present, the author's origins in the Midwest and his life now in the American South, and even as it opens out into broader perspective in voices and stories that spin through the heart of the book, it comes back to the quiet intimacy and vulnerability that drives this collection. Leavetaking and loss haunt the book, but a desire for connection and continuity keeps us coming back to the deck for that "gift of time together." - Ed Madden, author of Nest
I Only Left for Tea: Poems Reviews
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From childhood recollections to authors who infliuenced him, and from Indiana to his new home in South Carolina, the poet takes us along many paths but we return "To resume mid-sentence" . There are persons whom we meet, as Miss Harvey, grops of people, as in "Herstory", and the sense of always being home, while the poet muses on the Wabash of his youth and the Saluda of his new home. Poems often wisdom, sometimes reflective, but always worth reading.
