Reports from an Interior Province: New and Selected Poems

Reports from an Interior Province: New and Selected Poems traces Jeff Gundy's long journey as a restless, searching, embodied poet, rooted in his native Midwest and Mennonite tradition but constantly seeking new articulations, locations, and forms. Including work from eight published books and generous sets of new and uncollected poems, Reports showcases Gundy's enduring love of long-lined, unrhymed couplets that allow generous breathing space for his frequent swoops and veers among subjects and settings. His range also extends over brief lyrics, prose poems, and extended, multi-section narratives and meditations. Gundy's associative leaps and stretches flirt with surrealism and the fantastic, yet return often to natural landscapes and threads of quirky narrative.

"If Whitman were born in the Midwest to Mennonite parents, listened to Dylan and the Dead and loved to laugh at himself, observes Philip Metres, "he'd sound just like Jeff Gundy." Gundy traces both the sturdy beauties and the griefs and traumas of his home territory in poems like "Where I Live," from Flatlands: "how we love it, how we hate it, / how it did not quite kill us young."

His farm-boy earthiness has carried through Gundy's career as poet and professor, though Reports is also salted with poems about the small college life and leavened by generous doses of humor. "Most students believe they're more honest than most students," he observes ruefully in "Notes from the Faculty Meeting," and "After a national search, we hired Randy's brother."

Early on, Andrew Hudgins noted Gundy's characteristic theological curiosity, as well as his "verve, wit, passion, and deep intelligence." His poems have long contended with doubt and reverence, edging toward the mystical but refusing dogmatism.

Restless curiosity, and a Fulbright grant, led Gundy to extended stays in Salzburg and Lithuania, as well as many briefer journeys, and his poems often find fresh energy and unexpected rewards in encounters with new landscapes, cities, and people. "So much easier to blow things up than to get them right," he writes in "Rhapsody with Dark Matter," set in "the finest little town in Arkansas." "Letter to J. from the Ramada Inn Western Avenue, Albany" culminates with a main theme of his long career: "God wants / us all to love each other. But only / very slowly can we teach each other how."