Santos exhibits in this work how his poetry skillfully blends
elements of landscape with human emotion, employing
evocative images that are surrounded by profound meditative
language, while engaging nature in the manner of the Romantic
tradition to attain a reflection of the self, especially through use
of memory to reconcile the past and the present.
—from “The Fundamental Desire to Sing: Two Decades of Poetry by Sherod Santos” (Edward Byrne in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Volume V, Number 1: Fall/Winter 2003-2004 Issue)
I am pleased to note that Sherod Santos will be reading his poetry this Thursday, September 30 at 6:30 p.m., in the Christ College Refectory of Mueller Hall at Valparaiso University. This presentation is part of the fall schedule of symposia by Christ College, Valparaiso University’s honors college. Santos’s appearance is co-sponsored by the Wordfest program and the Valparaiso University Department of English.Sherod Santos is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Intricated Soul: New and Selected Poems. A previous collection of poems, The Pilot Star Elegies, was a finalist for both the National Book Award and The New Yorker Book Award. His other honors include an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the B.F. Connors Long Poem Prize from Paris Review, and the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Prize. His book of essays on poetry and poetics, A Poetry of Two Minds, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. A book of translations, Greek Lyric Poetry, won the Umhoefer Prize.
Santos is a past “featured poet” in Valparaiso Poetry Review, and readers are invited to examine the Fall/Winter 2003-2004 issue of VPR, which contains three of his poems, plus an interview with the poet and an extended commentary on his work.
Perhaps it’s possible that the way poetry can “make something happen” is quite different from the way we’ve come to expect. And perhaps insufficient notice has been taken of this simple but unassailable truth: that however awkward and maladept, however grand and uplifting, it isn’t just a matter of what we sing, or how well we sing, it’s the quite remarkable fact that, in a century like ours, we’ve somehow managed to save from extinction that deep-down, fundamental desire to sing.
—Sherod Santos, “In a Glass, Darkly” from A Poetry of Two Minds
About The Intricated Soul: New and Selected Poems
The Intricated Soul gathers poems from five previous books. Sherod Santos’s identity as a poet is based on his courageous resolve to take on the most difficult subjects. Whether writing about love, madness, or genocide, he engages “the most moving truths we can know about our shared humanity” (Washington Post).
"Sherod Santos is a contemporary master of the lyric poem. Here, in The Intricated Soul, we witness the astonishing effects of his powerful, restless poetic imagination in its fullest palette of modes—from miniature portraits to lavish landscapes, from intensely compressed lyrics to extended speculations on suicide and marriage, grieving and loving, residence and erasure. Santos is musician and thinker, architect and bard, theorist and witness, and we are the lucky recipients of the singular, radiant gift of The Intricated Soul, a book for our rejoicing."
—David Baker, author of Never-Ending Birds
"The passing, elusive, just-beyond-earshot adjustments of heart that seem, later on, to have sealed our fate. The earthly traces left by epic savagery. The god-shaped empty space from which the gods have now departed. This and more: and Sherod Santos is their laureate. Contriving the intricate riches of The Intricated Soul is a fierceness worthy of Donne and a tenderness worthy of Herbert."
—Linda Gregerson, author of Magnetic North
This event is free and open to the public. Copies of books by Sherod Santos will be available for purchase. A reception and book signing will follow the reading.
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