Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine

“To the Anniversary Edition of his celebrated first collection Jesse Graves has added a dozen poems. These newcomers expand, but do not distress, the careful vision, the gaze that is steady while moving within and outside specific times and places. The individual object and the singular personality are for this poet compendia of experiences that refresh themselves as they age. One moment of the past opens to “the brisk future / decades that awaited us still unlived.” The achievement of Tennessee Landscape ever enlarges.”
—Fred Chappell

“‘The meaning in our lives usually stands right beside us, / We might pick it up and carry it into the light.’ In the new expanded edition of Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, poet Jesse Graves carries the land and people of his early life into the light, offering an unforgettable accounting of rural working-class life without a hint of tiresome irony, judgement, parody, or apology. This book’s ghosts aren’t opaque, ethereal, light: they are vivid, complex, messy, colorful, and so fully human that we sense them near. These tender, wise, and generous poems will crack open your heart. On the last page, you may find yourself, like Graves, with ‘the imprint of … ancestors / stamped into the grain of my sifting hands.’”
—Rita Sims Quillen
 

“Jesse Graves is a Tennessee state treasure, and his Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine is an important and beautiful American literary landmark. Indeed, I know of no poet of my generation more attuned to or instructive of a place than Graves. His companionable, melodic, exquisitely physical and moving poems offer help to those of us who mourn our own places and lives there as they were, while offering a graceful and wise example of how to go on loving those places and lives as they have become. If you would unlearn the seeming contradiction between grief and grateful awareness, travel these pages, saying goodbye on the road out to the old, rusted, Graves family hay rake as you go, ‘goodbye to the five / leaning wheels, their crooked tines turning, reaching up / like broken fingers to wave hello, hello, goodbye.’”
—Jonathan Johnson

"In Tennessee Landscape, Graves finds nature reverts to its own form despite the unceasing efforts of mankind to alter it." —Greg Langley, The Advocate