Selected Poems by Jay Bryan

Jay Bryan’s poetry can be compared to the eggs in his poem “Unfolding.” Bryan’s poems are “clear and bold, their layers / shimmer free in your Jugtown bowl, then churned into white foam, / delicate tufts of promise.” This new book is delicious.

–Leah Maines, Publisher, Finishing Line Press

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

Family is the focus of many of the poems here and Jay Bryan notices the quiet moments, “a bluebird enters her birdhouse,” when the love that passes from one person to another is not spoken but felt.

–Poet Michael Chitwood, author of Poor-Mouth Jubilee, From Whence, and Gospel Road Going

Jay Bryan‘s poems have a special feeling about them—-filled to bursting with the stuff of real life, they are both deeply personal yet simultaneously universal. Baking a chocolate pie from a yellowed recipe left by his deceased wife, Carroll, becomes the metaphor for love as the continuing link between life and death:

For all that was, is and
is to come, the breath
of your spirit now breathed into me
leavens this gift.

Many indeed are the gifts of the spirit to be found here. In a poem written as a letter to their children away at college, specific details of loss and love mingle on the Chapel Hill farm with its early blooming daffodils, pets, old friends, heron ” rising from a plume of water,” yellow schoolbuses, warbling cockatiel, bonfire in the distance, horses in the pasture, and everywhere, “Wendy’s love.” I cannot imagine a more real or more moving poem.

–Lee Smith, North Carolina Novelist

Jay Bryan knows a secret, and the poems in Selected Poems set the compass needle cleanly and kindly “always pointing home.” Home, is that secret ―certainly the home of family living and gone, honored pets, and revered objects and spaces which he observes with a tender and celebratory verve. But Bryan ― former Carrboro Poet Laureate; devoted husband, son, father, grandfather, and friend; and North Carolina lawyer, and former Carrboro Board of Alderman― brings the wisdom distinguished in those walks of his life into these poems to also express his fraternity in the human house. The poems move from the kitchen to the farmyard, the sick bed to the court room, the marriage bed to a grandfather’s joyful pride with equal compassion and awe: “the view on high overwhelming / the understanding inside sublime.” It’s hard to imagine a more embracing voice than Bryan’s here celebrating his grandson’s second birthday: “I see you in the center / of the heart of all matter / having run there with all your might / only to stop and tilt your head / eyes hungry with curiosity…/ to the roar / of every living thing.”
–Poet Jeffery Beam, author of Gospel Earth, The Broken Flower, and Visions of Dame Kind

Jay Bryan’s poetry can be compared to the eggs in his poem “Unfolding.” Bryan’s poems are “clear and bold, their layers / shimmer free in your Jugtown bowl, then churned into white foam, / delicate tufts of promise.” This new book is delicious.

–Leah Maines, senior editor, Finishing Line Press and published poet.

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]