Abandoned Earth
Linwood D. Rumney
Winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award - 2015
“In Abandoned Earth, Linwood Rumney creates a world both menacing and comforting at once. While wide-eyed with wonder at life’s sorrows, joys and mysteries, he maintains an understated tone that enables him to relate even the strangest events with a measured and convincing voice. This beautifully written collection contains what few books of poetry manage: high spirits, a keen eye and, above all, an embracing wisdom.” —John Skoyles, PloughsharesPoetry Editor and author of Suddenly Its Evening: Selected Poems
“I love the clarity and precision of Linwood Rumney’s poems and his restrained yet intense voice. Intense because it is restrained, pressurized by his deft use of stanzaic structures and forms. Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams seem to be among his influences, but his voice and vision are clearly his own. Rumney writes about the natural world and the human world, and he sees in both of them a terrible 'excess' and a brutal 'lack'. But, as in 'A Mystery on the Greyhound Bus', he also recognizes that 'simple beauty persists', like the finch feeding her chicks in a bus station eave while a man on the platform, both laughing and crying, waves to a woman on the departing bus. Far more than simple beauty, that image—and Rumney’s poetry throughout this book—is resonant and complex in the most compelling way”. —Eric Nelson, judge and author of Some Wonder: poems
Linwood D. Rumney
Linwood Rumney was recently given a Creative Writing Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society. His poems have appeared widely in journals, including North American Review, Hotel Amerika, New Millennium Writing, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and Puerto del Sol, and they have been anthologized by Jacar, FutureCycle, and Main Street Rag. Translations of Aloysius Bertrand, an early practitioner of the modern prose poem in French, have appeared in Arts & Letters, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. An Associate Editor for Black Lawrence Press and previous Poetry Editor for Redivider, he has received awards from the St. Botolph Club and the Writer’s Room of Boston, as well as Kimmel Harding Nelson Center Residency. Originally from Central Maine, he currently lives in Cincinnati, where he completed a PhD as a Charles Phelps Taft Dissertation Fellow.
