From the back cover:

 

Brimming with darkness and forgetting, Live at Lethe is an epeic collection composed of short lyric reflections, steeped in the waters of oblivion. This tapestry of loss is woven with the dark silk of southern ecological destruction and the passing of the poet's grandfather—post-fugitive agrarian novelist Madison Jones—whose work reflected a fear that the south had lost its "redemptive memory." The elegiac songs of Live at Lethe reach wildly for meaning in a world increasingly filled with disappearance and shadow.

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Praise for Live at Lethe:

 

M.P. Jones juxtaposes short Zen-like observations beside each longer, more detailed poem, all the words seeming to hover around the one wistful hope expressed so hauntingly in “Ebenezer Swamp” : “I don’t want to be a stranger to this world/ … to be afraid of the night…/is this the stuff we are all made of/sharp and vicious sad and slow….”   These poems will haunt you, change your shape slightly, make you a piece of the world in a new way.  You should read this book.                     —Gail Entrekin, Editor Canary Magazine.

 

Poets have been seeking inspiration in the natural world for centuries, and Live at Lethe continues in this tradition, encouraging us to look into the mirror that the pastoral provides. However, from the opening poem, where birds become “a chorus of black lungs cry[ing],” we understand these poems to be more than songs of praise. They question their natural (and unnatural) surroundings, too, posing decidedly contemporary queries, as when the poet asks whether “steam [will] still rise from the pavement / on hot summer mornings after the rain?” That mirror, once gazed upon with such ease, grows cloudy with shadows as Jones, unwilling to leave any darkened riverbed or crane-scattered night unexplored, declares, “I don’t want to be a stranger to this world.” And neither do we.

—Keetje Kuipers, Author of Beautiful in the Mouth, Poetry Editor, Southern Humanities Review

 

The astonishing debut from M.P. Jones IV should not be missed.  Deftly following the epigraph from Wendell Berry (“light of the blast / that will print your shadow on stone”), Jones’ Live at Lethe deals with permanence, loss, and the nuanced shadows of what’s past and what we forget.  Like Thoreau’s thoughtful living sucking life’s bones, Jones gives us what readers want: internal solitude, a consciousness that never stops, coupled with apt perceptions of an equally lively world.  He gives us “morning’s grey throat, red hair like some Promethean fire,” and “the moon getting lit carousing with cloud wisps.” Whether tackling gods or something as tangible as a county road, Jones knows how to “move out of the bitter-grown logic” and see the unpredictable.  I love his work.

—Erica Dawson, Author of Big-Eyed Afraid

Poetry Editor, Tampa Review