Title Details

Rod Jellema is professor emeritus of English at theUniversity of Maryland. His award-winning poetry hasappeared in three previous collections: SomethingTugging the Line, The Lost Faces, and The EighthDay: New and Selected Poems.

“Rod Jellema’s life project has been to play edges against one another: light against darkness, joy against tragedy, life against death, spirit against body, language against silence. This collection brilliantly reveals a master at work. It is a book of astonishing beauty.”
— Jeanne Murray Walker
author of New Tracks, Night Falling

“This moving body of work tells us what is holy in Rod Jellema’s world — not spirit alone, nor flesh alone, but their melding; not wind alone, but blown hair and leaves and ‘swimsuits tossed on the vine to dry.’ . . . These poems invite us to celebrate and remember what abounds and abides, what matters, what sings.”
— Margaret Gibson
author of One Body: Poems

“Like his summer neighbor, the dulcimer maker who ‘whistles to the wood he works / until the wood is fit for its strings,’ Rod Jellema whistles quietly and steadily over the material of his art, and for five decades has made his lines and stanzas fit a vision of experience that records a deep, spiritual humanism located in community, people, and the natural world.”
— Michael Collier
author of The Ledge: Poems

“Rod Jellema’s Incarnality, embodying a life well-lived in art, collects the art formed of that life: poems for which all readers should be thankful; poems that reveal a mind that is open, mindful, and generous; poems whose voices move from the meditative to the humorous to the self-deprecating. . . . Incarnality is art of the highest order.”
— Greg McBride
founding editor of The Innisfree Poetry Journal