Some Moments in a Gentle War by David MacRae Landon

$17.99

 

In the intimate voice of a wise friend over a glass of wine, Landon’s poems both narrate and participate in a “gentle war”—that is, a quiet but noble campaign “to take back history from violence.” In locations ranging from the Metropolitan Museum to a rural Piggly Wiggly, Montaigne and Bach are at home, but so are the mundane details of unfolded laundry, a paper cup—all invested with what Landon calls “magic.” The enchantment is in the verse itself, a deftly conversational form distilled from Landon’s years as a Shakespearean actor. But don’t be fooled: these captivating poems are as current as today’s news, and give the reader strength to bear it.

–Jennifer D. Michael, Author of Let Me Let Go and Dubious Breath (Finishing Line Press)

 

In this splendid new collection, David Landon mines quotidian experience for its luminous gists, finding them as he conjures Montaigne late one night in a corner of the Piggly Wiggly parking lot in Monteagle, TN, or recalls a moment of in-flight pizzaz approaching Idlewild. These are poems in which the trials of life, the inevitable disabilities of advancing age, are met with a joyful exuberance. The gentle war is the war against entropy and despair, fought with love, hope, and gratitude. This is a book which discharges and inspires gratitude.

–Charles Martin, author of The Khayyam Suite (Johns Hopkins, 2025)

 

With clarity and formal grace, Some Moments In a Gentle War traces the contours of a life richly experienced. David Landon‘s voice is frank, erudite, and threaded with surprising tenderness as he reflects on the passage of time and honors “the art of day to day.” These are poems to celebrate and cherish.

–Caki Wilkinson, author of The Survival Expo

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Some Moments in a Gentle War

by David MacRae Landon

Paper

$15.99 List: $17.99

979-8-88838-785-6

2024

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This title will be released on November 8, 2024

Some Moments in a Gentle War need to be remembered, demand celebration.

This collection of poems borrows its title from a line of the second poem, “Kleos, or Fame”. “Kleos” also begins the story of the war, “gentle” because it is a commitment, at times a struggle, to care: for each other and our world, from moment to moment, from day to day. To fight the gentle war is to live in opposition to another war, a war associated in several of the poems with “history”: reckless ambition, abuse of power, indifference to suffering, violence. There are moments—at times mysterious—when we feel the gentle war may win, so let’s celebrate, let’s remember those moments. In iambic pentameter? It is a meter usually more vigorous than gentle. But there are moments we want to remember and celebrate with vigor!

David Landon is the Bishop Juhan Professor of Theatre Emeritus at the University of the South in Sewanee. He won the American Academy Poetry Prize as an undergraduate at Harvard, where he was class poet. More recent poems have appeared in Able Muse (Write Prize), Southwest Review (Marr Prize, runner-up), Georgia Review (Lorraine Williams Prize, featured finalist), and elsewhere. As an actor he has performed with the Nashville, Alabama, and New York Shakespeare Festivals, with the Provincetown and New Orleans Tennessee Williams’ Festivals. Several of his undergraduate poems were republished in the Harvard Advocate Centennial Anthology (T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, E.E. Cummings, etc.).

 

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