Scott Owens describes his new volume of poetry: "I grew up in
two worlds: my father's parents' world of brick homes, city
streets, shopping, and playgrounds; and my mother's parents' world
of dirt roads, livestock, growing our own food, and endless woods.
That second world was undeniably harder than the first. The work
was dirtier, and there was more of it. The homes had fewer
luxuries: no cable, no AC, never more than one bathroom. Even death
was different. In town, death was a polished event that took place
elsewhere: hospitals, nursing homes, slaughter houses, funeral
parlors. On the farm, animals were killed every week and most
people died at home, and their bodies stayed there until they were
buried."
"Somehow, however, that second world still seemed much more
alive, much more real and vital. Despite that vitality, I was aware
that most people knew almost nothing about that second world. It
was then, and is increasingly now, an undiscovered country where
life and death exist side by side with a natural intensity missing
from the artificial world of the city."
"This book, " Owens tells us, "dedicated to my grandfather (one
who knew how to own land), is a record of my undiscovered country
and the people who lived there."
Critical Acclaim
"Landscape and memory are seamlessly merged in this excellent
volume. Like all the best writers of place, Scott Owens finds the
heart's universal concerns in his vivid rendering of piedmont
Carolina." -Ron Rash, Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian
Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University
"There's not a speck of sentimentality in the rural poetic
Americana framed by Scott Owens in "For One Who Knows How to Own
Land." There are dead crows, red dirt earth, barking dogs, burning
coal, fox traps, and flooding rivers. These stories matter. The
poems all rattle and sing. This is a jolt of strong coffee for a
watery time." -John Lane, author of "The Woods Stretched for Miles:
Contemporary Nature Writing from the South"
"In "For One Who Knows How to Own Land, " poet Scott Owens
creates, with a mature voice, childhood reminiscences of pastoral
summers in the red-dirt rural Piedmont of upstate South Carolina.
This, his most affecting collection to date, is a remarkable
sensory journey that registers narrative moments along the entire
emotional scale from harsh to tender, from the threatening to the
anodyne. Through the magical nature of memory, these poems of
mystery and loss prove again and again that 'The boy who left this
country/ never stopped hearing its names/ echo in his ear.'" -Tim
Peeler, author of "Checking Out"
"'Why should this be home?' Scott Owens asks us in 'Homeplace, '
his question as much about leaving as going back. We walk his train
tracks and ridges as if they were our own, as though home were
'something you held tight before you, / your back bending against
its going away.' In this both visceral and meditative rendering of
place, decay and rebirth are part of the same landscape. I applaud
the skill that directs us down a path of experience and familiarity
to 'stone steps/ that dead-end in mid-air.' His poetry is wise in
knowing the weight of its own footsteps." -Linda Annas Ferguson,
author of "Dirt Sandwich"
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