Jeffrey Gray is an associate professor of English at Seton Hall University.
Jeffrey Gray, himself, as he tells us, a veteran traveler, has
produced an intriguing and highly original study on the centrality
of travel in post-World War II American poetry. Travel, as Gray
defines it, means disorientation and destabilization, the loss of
certainty and familiarity, the condition of homelessness. From
Elizabeth Bishop, for whom 'travel' became the condition of life,
to the exilic writing of Derek Walcott, the mental travels of John
Ashbery, and the conception of travel as the hunt for a new
language in Lyn Hejinian's Oxota, Gray provides us with our own
critical journey through the realms of late-twentieth-century
poetic consciousness. Most of the poets discussed here have been
written about frequently, but Gray sheds genuinely new light on the
momentum of their work.--Marjorie Perloff "author of Wittgenstein's
Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary"
Jeffrey Gray's Mastery's End reads as a complex and intelligent
unpacking of the trope of travel. It's a metaphor that in his hands
allows us to better understand not only each of the four main poets
discussed but--in the long run--ourselves as well. This study is a
significant and vital contribution to our understanding of
contemporary American and Caribbean poetry.--Paul Mariani "author
of Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius"
Jeffrey Gray's remarkable book, Mastery's End, carries the reader
on an exhilarating journey down many unexpected paths. As a
seasoned traveler and a wise literary critic, Gray explores the
creative and inventive forms in which American poets have
encountered and expressed their worlds. From Bishop's Ouro Preto
and Lowell's 'mud smooth path' to Walcott's 'Tropic Zone' and
Ashbery's 'sun-blackened landscape, ' Gray reveals the dazzling
variety and complexity of contemporary lyrics that express the
fears, uncertainty, nostalgia, longing, and pleasures of perceiving
the familiar, the new, the foreign, the unknown.--Emory Elliott
"University of California, Riverside"
This is a great book--and in two distinct ways. It is the most
capacious guide to recent and contemporary American poetry now
available. And it provides a radically new and productive approach
to considering the entwined relations between travel and
literature. If scholars weren't interested in those topics before,
they will be now.--Steven Gould Axelrod "editor of The New
Anthology of American Poetry"
The close readings in Mastery's End are so smart and so generous
that one finishes the book hoping that Gray turns next to an even
wider-ranging study of contemporary poetry.--American
Literature
This volume allows the reader to meet these familiar poets on new
ground, to hear texts in voices at once familiar and
new.--Choice
Through Gray's original and revealing readings of poems concerning
travel, one learns much about the state of postmodernity.--Midwest
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