Ghost Pain

de Sydney Lea

"Ghost Pain articulates and explores many of the most painful, important themes of the last century, which extend like feelings from a lost limb into the current century: addiction, violence, the relation of the individual to the community and the larger world, the uses and the inadequacies of art. In Lea's poems these subjects are examined, not through the trendy lens of disembodied poetic consciousness, but through the lives and language of actual people. Lea renders the voices of rural New England - Tony, the poet's friend who rebuilds a classic Chevy; singers in the church choir; children playing on the town square lawn. In Lea's rendering, these people may look like a Rockwell painting - the New England backdrop is little changed - but they are more the descendants of Frost's people in their inner dark, no longer sure of their purpose or place. They are, in short, our contemporaries."--Jacket.