Acts: Poems
Description
A book of poems that reckons with love in all its forms, by the priest and poet Spencer Reece—his first collection in ten years.
. . . My old love,
my love who gave me language that I love,
when there are no words, there are only acts.
Spencer Reece, a poet and an Episcopal priest, suffuses his poetry with tenderness, humanity, and a wonderous alchemy of beauty and sorrow. As the Nobel laureate Louise Glück wrote, “emanating from Spencer Reece’s work [is] a sense of immanence that belongs more commonly to religious passion; it is a great thing to have it again in art.”
Acts, the third book of poetry by Reece, is the product of a decade of work and of a life acutely lived. In it, he celebrates the language and literature of Spain and tracks his tenure at the Spanish Episcopal Church. At times, the collection is a love letter to Madrid; at other moments, to Old Lyme, Connecticut, where the speaker’s parents lived until the death of his father, and to Little Compton, Rhode Island. The poems are also an homage to the letter itself, to its art and its waning means of connection across distance. In Acts, Reece confronts grief and love, loneliness and self-acceptance, with honesty, artful lyricism, and, above all, a true and luminous grace.
Praise for Acts: Poems
"The excellent latest from Reece is immersed in a faithful, but not unquestioning, lyricism, in part inflected by his life as a priest . . . Righteousness and puritanism are the enemy in these pages, and a leavening wit seeks to amplify, and deepen, an erotic of piety . . .These poems are generously companionable hymns of delight in service." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"For Reece, the challenge is to write the words as lovingly as he is supposed to perform the acts the words describe, but which are wordless. The best poems in this collection enact this paradox, which is nowhere near as simple as it sounds." —Michael Autrey, Booklist
“. . . when you / become a ghost in one world you become / a guest in another. . .” Spencer Reece writes poems of deep searching—haunted, haunting meditations on what it feels like to be in and out of place. In this book absence and presence are never quite opposites, and a quest for the meanings of home nurtures a lyricism of rare and beautiful combinations: perplexity and wisdom, desirousness and patience, risk and restraint. Acts is–in the full sense of the word—a blessing." —Matthew Bevis, author of Wordsworth's Fun
