To the Wren: Collected & New Poems
"Mead ... wrote clean, spare, often elegiac lines"
—The New York Times
This massive collection houses Mead’s life’s work: seven books spanning twenty-seven years. Follow chronologically through decades and become captivated by heartfelt muses on loss, madness, danger, grief, isolation, and self-identity. Her poems explore spaces we often try to ignore and finds a comfortable middle ground. Mead candidly and openly weaves together pain and joy until it meshes into glimpses of humanity.
Some Praise for To the Wren:
“Mead’s versatility, scholarship, and curiosity contribute to the strength of her craft. . . . Her oeuvre is so spacious that it constantly invites journeys down imagined avenues.”
— Barbara Berman for The Rumpus
“The poems in Jane Mead’s final books, as well as the new poems, are the fulfillment of a life’s work, a life’s writing. …[Her] lyrical argument is settled finally on her own terms, on her own premises, and according to her own masterful sense of language, singing:
…And then: music.”
— Carol Muske Dukes for the Los Angeles Review of Books
“It’s both remarkable and telling that this essential volume, in which a lifetime of work coheres into a kind of secular devotional, is practically presaged in one of Mead’s earliest poems: “I wanted to make a prayer / I spent the youthful part / of a life-time on it.”