Recounting the Seasons

Poems, 1958–2005

John Engels
Foreword by David Huddle

“What a great pleasure it is to have this collected edition of John Engels’s poems. Back in the noble days of modernism, when we had such fearless exponents of poetic form and language as Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, and Ted Roethke, Engels was an acknowledged master. His poems remain as strong and compelling as ever. His expressly demonstrative relationship to nature is entirely cogent and stimulating. Engels will always be an American treasure. His poems are a joy for all readers and a model for the young.” —Hayden Carruth

“John Engels is one of the handful of essential poets of his generation. What is distinctive about Engels’s poetry is that it has not only sustained its power and craft over the many years of his efforts but also enhanced it.” —Sydney Lea

“It is quite a joyous realization that the collected poems of John Engels have come together to comprise a rich volume. This is not just a significant moment for contemporary poetry; it is notable in the complete annals of American poetry—the coming together of all the resonant, inventive work of one of our most prodigiously gifted and dedicated poets.” —Paul Zimmer

Recounting the Seasons gathers together the work of noted American poet John Engels. Engels’s writing is distinguished by its astonishing range—long, short, easy, difficult, philosophical, casual, despairing, joyful, silly, bawdy, heartbreaking, angry, affectionate, uplifting, abrasive, sexy, chaste, polite, and bad-mannered. Arranged chronologically, this book contains nearly all of the poems that Engels has published and features a section of new and previously unpublished poems.

JOHN ENGELS (1931–2007) is the author of eleven volumes of poetry and is professor of English at St. Michael’s College in Vermont. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, he has garnered numerous awards for his poetry, including National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Rockefeller fellowships. His work has appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and many other publications.

Reviews

“Engels’ ‘nature,’ in Joycean parlance, is a concretely realized ‘audible-visible-gnosible-edible world.’ Yet throughout the eleven volumes represented here (together with a group of uncollected poems), the theme of loss merges with a sense of the insufficiency of language, personified at last in the figure of Adam. . . . [This] street-talking reviewer, sadly unattuned to the original, no less than a substantial class of less disadvantaged readers, will return with gratitude and admiration to John Engels’ supplement for ‘a long time.’ ” — Notre Dame Review

“Engels was a poet of great distinction . . . There is neither space enough nor time to do justice to the six hundred pages of Recounting the Seasons: Poems, 1956-2005. For this volume, Engels elected to order the poems just as they were in their original collections, preserving their original contexts.” — The Georgia Review