Jane Gentry (1941--2014) possessed an uncanny ability to spin quietly expansive and wise verses from small details, objects, and remembered moments. The hallmarks of her work are insight into nature, faith, the quotidian, and -- perhaps most prominently -- the grounding of her home and family in the state of Kentucky. This innovative poet and critic was for many years one of the animating spirits of literary life in the region. Gentry and her daughters collaborated with editor Julia Johnson to organize this definitive collection. The result is an important literary anthology that assembles Gentry's most celebrated poems alongside new, previously unpublished works. Johnson uses Gentry's own methodology to arrange the poems in sequences comparable to those found in her previous collections. This organization showcases the range of the poet's work and the flexibility of her style, which is sometimes ironic and humorous; sometimes poignant; but always clear, intelligent, and revelatory. This volume includes two full-length collections of poetry in their entirety -- A Garden in Kentucky and Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig. The final section features Gentry's unpublished work, bringing together her early poems, verses written for loved ones, and a large group of more recent work that may have been intended for future collections. Alternately startling and heart-wrenching, The New and Collected Poems of Jane Gentry offers a valuable retrospective of the celebrated poet's work.

These rich, lyrical poems, written by Jane Gentry over ten years, register the resonance between the poet's inner being and the outer world's everyday events. Moments of insight -- gained while watching a roofer at work next door, napping with the cat, reading on the porch, carrying the laundry, or strolling the aisles of Sam's Club -- expose the bright bones of the swiftness of time's passage, reminding us to stay attentive. Gentry's poems are deeply grounded in the continuity of family and homeplace yet also embrace new experiences. The juxtaposition of the ordinary and the beautiful, the paradox of the mundane and the artistic -- whether in nature, in relationships, in memories, or in the body -- are the hallmarks of her second collection.

The years took our house, cool and dark,
generous as a healthy heart, where in September
a cricket sang under the kitchen hearth.

They took my mother with her red hair
and her creamy skin, and my father
whose laughing head shone with the fire
of summer as he shoveled corn to his pigs.

When I awoke one day, my bloom
was past. Those who loved me first were dead,
and promises had blown away like chaff
or clouds, which dazzle now only in the moment
of their height and roll.
The years have given back the thing itself.
-- from "My Life Story"

In this collection Jane Gentry evokes, in images as haunting as the Kentucky landscape, a garden thriving with the flowers of memory, a physical world that reflects a realm of transcendence. In this garden, cosmic harmony reveals itself in the ""ciphers"" of roots and worms, in a piece of blue willow china, ""a blaze of balance, of wholeness"", that survives a fire in which a lonely, tormented neighbor died. The white sheets crack in the wind, fat bellies of sails sweet as round stomachs of children. Stark, lovely, elegiac, gently surreal, Gentry's poems resonate and echo in the vast spaces of the heart; long after being read, lines return, lines like those of the lovely ""In the Moment of My Death (For My Father)"" that beg to be memorized: In the moment of my death may your old happiness light my way; and the image of your face smiling, happy at my coming, be a lantern in the dark. The taste of desire, the pang of remembered loss, the sorrow of leaving a house, Jane Gentry has found a way to make these things new. A Garden in Kentucky is a place of mystery, terror, beauty, and wonder, a garden to which readers will find themselves retuning again and again.