A Small Pad of Paper

Amid the "contorted ontogenies and broken phylogenies" that threaten to undo us, the poems of A Small Pad of Paper rummage the ancient, the universal, and the contemporary in search of the wholly human. The "gnostic light that fogs the daytime passage / where nothing is clear" is no match for Steven Joyce's expansive embrasure of religion, philosophy, myth, and history in the pursuit of "a life / that breathes and sings." The integrity of these poems lies in their intelligence and humility, in the courage "to wake and try another day / for a moment's evolution.

Peter Filkins is an award-winning poet and translator and the Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature at Bard College at Simon's Rock. He is the author of five books of poems including his new volume, Water / Music.

In this wry, trenchant collection of poems, Steven Joyce deftly illuminates fragile faiths. He limns human meaning-making as heaving yet sighingly provisional notes on a pad of paper. The secret of these notes, in the end, is that this collection is not to be missed: it is a joy to read.

Dr. Norman Jones is a professor of English at The Ohio State University as well as Dean and Director at The Ohio State University-Mansfield campus. He is the author of Provincializing the Bible: Faulkner and Postsecular American Literature.

In A Small Pad of Paper Steven Joyce depicts a world that is "asphyxiating, pouting, and fussing for some attention" in language of luminous intensity. His poetic and musical intimations, at once brilliantly precise and sumptuously lyrical, create inflections of Greek mythology and contemporaneity that crosshatch and mutually inform, resonating with both doubt and wonder. The breadth of cultural references, the richness of metaphors, and the elegance of poetic language in this work leaves the reader enthralled and in a thinking repose.

Professor Ewa Borkowska is a professor of English in the Faculty of Humanities, Institute of Literary Studies at the University of Silesia, Poland. Her most recent article is entitled "Ted Hughes and the Poetry of the Four Seasons."