rev. of The Light the Dead See: The Selected Poems of Frank Stanford

For the thirteen years since Frank Stanford's suicide at twenty-nine, most of his nine books, which were all from small presses, have been difficult if not impossible to find. Leon Stokesbury has done an impressive job winnowing the more than one thousand pages of Stanford's published poetry to one hundred and ten, including six previously unpublished poems and an informative, insightful introduction. The resulting
The Light the Dead See is one of the most compelling and welcome books to come out in a very long time.

Stanford who was raised and continued to live along the Mississippi where his father built and tended levees, never strays far from the language or the stories of his childhood and the levee workers he was drawn to, or at least some version of them. For Stanford, from the earliest poems, pushes the boundaries of the simplest narrative, the most homespun image, to create the most powerful and convincing surrealist-influenced poetry from the Seventies. Perhaps because he writes with such authority and rough-hewn wit about the things of his world, the surrealist influence rarely obscures or dates these poems, but rather serves to open the door to a larger, truly unique vision. Here is "The Minnow," a poem from Stanford's first book: "If I press / on its head, ‘ the eyes / will come out / like stars. / The ripples / it makes / can move / the moon." His later, searing, death-obsessed poems have few equals among the works of his contemporaries and are well-represented in this
selection.

Perhaps with the publication of this book, Stanford's reputation as a poet's poet will be revised as these poems reach and will, no doubt, astonish the larger audience they deserve.