Lost & Found , by the author of Letters Home and The Chinese Poet Awakens takes us back to poet's earlier years and in particular to memories of his father and his son and daughter.  This book is now in its second printing.
 
 

Author

Jeff Daniel Marion grew up in Rogersville, Tennessee and now serves as poet-in-residence and Director of the Appalachian Center at Carson-Newman College.  As poet, editor, printer, teacher, and lecturer, he has helped to create and support the literature of the region over the last three decades. 

In 1994 he was honored at the annual literary festival at Emory & Henry College in Emory, Virginia.  In 1996 he delivered the Palmer Memorial Lecture at Cumberland College and in 1998 he was named the Copenhaver Scholar-in-Residence at Roanoke College.  He lives in Knoxville with his wife, Linda.

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Reviews

"The language of Danny Marion's poetry [is] clear, elemental, suffused with infinite, subtle perspectives.  As usual, his lines ring with hammerstrokes of the master craftsman, and like all things shaped by long experience and the deep eye, they are rich, sufficient to their reach, and enduring." - Deborah Pope

"[E]ach new collection has been clearer and deeper than the last.  He is a master of guileless simplicity: "truth's most becoming garb"…  His poems are free of personal ambition and egotism and literary agendas, leaving nothing but pure poetry, scrubbed clean as a stone in an Appalachian stream." - Ted Kooser

"[E]ach of these perfectly tuned poems is a "bell of blue clarity ringing across the miles," a music through which the images of the natural world enfold the human story of loss and renewal within its own ancient story of dark giving way to light, water returning ceaselessly to source." - Kathryn Stripling Byer

Jeff Daniel Marion's poetry reveals what an infinity of glory surrounds us with its ordinary daily things.  Here is work as pure and clear and miraculous as virgin spring water.  Lost & Found is simply marvelous.  -  Fred Chappell

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Excerpts

CHRISTMAS FIREWORKS, 1948

All day they soaked the softballs,
Rag wrapped, tightly bound wads,
In kerosene so that come evening 
And the fall of blue dark, they
Stood in the streets, our fathers
In mackinaws and leather work gloves,
Their shouted words patches of smoke
Lifting across the icy distances of neighborhood.

All this to hurl great flames across the sky
To one another, to get their fill of catching
Shooting stars, to laugh at the darkness
Shot through with arcing fiery fastballs,
Our blazing ornaments of memory.
 

THE MAN WHO LOVED HUMMINGBIRDS

Once I saw my father
 lift from last fall's leaves
  below our wide picture window

a hummingbird, victim
 of reflected surfaces, the one clue
  a single feather clinging above the sill.

He cradled its body in his cupped
 hands and breathed across the fine
  iridescent chest and ruby throat.

I remembered all the times
 his hands became birdcalls, whistles,
  crow's caw from a blade of grass.

Then the bird stirred and rose
 to perch on his thumb.
  As he slowly raised his hand

the wings began to hum
 and my father's breath lifted
  and flew out across the world.
 
 

THE MAN WHO MADE COLOR
  for the memory of my father
  J. D. Marion
  1915-1990

Consider the lilies, we have been told,
they toil not,
neither do they labor. 

But I have sweated in the fall sun
to plant this hillside
in a cascade of hues, held
in a ring of rocks I have carried
from the river. 

Long ago on my first day of school,
the teacher asked, "What does your father do?"
"He makes color," I said.
"Oh…I see."

But she did not see the man
who stood before vats of color
deep as flame
and dipped his finger in,
touching paper, testing the tack
of ink.

I saw him believe in the truth
of touch, the message only his fingers
woud tell, color splashing
across rolling sheets of labels:
Bugler, Del Monte, Van Camp,
School Days, Lucky Strike,

Consider these lilies, Father, their color
a swash of words I roll across
my tongue-Harbor Blue, Open Hearth,
Spindazzle, Kindly Light.  They sway
on their long stems but a day.
They know no grief, no loss,
only a tumble of color,
season to season, across this hillside.
Their blossoms unfold bright as flame,
ready for your touch.
 
 

THE WILD GEESE

  I

Morning arrives in September,
 the mist already risen
  from the river, and across

the cool blue distance
 comes the call of wild geese,
  the clarity of their cries

awakening an unnamed yearning.
 I cannot see them but know
  their presence by the remembered call.

  II

I have come to this house
 on the Holston, drawn by waters
  I cannot fathom.

A hermit preceded me, his days spent 
 fishing, telling his story to any
  who would listen:

the night he lifted a pistol
 to his head and pulled the trigger,
  the empty click resounding a lifetime

in his hearing.  I never met him,
 but in his honor place
  this blue bottle on my sill,

wait for morning light
 to bring it brimful.

My first week here the geese
 came paddling and circling in the shallow
  pools.  "I could almost believe

it was a welcoming party," I said
 to my son and daughter that evening
  as I wished for them this blessing

of geese.  When I raised my hand
 to the river, they came, V formation
  across the fields, and softly sat

themselves down on the water,
 riding its currents for what
  I can only believe was pure pleasure.

  III

Long ago in a cabin in Virginia
 I awoke to the honking of geese,
  the flock descending across the cornfields

to settle on the pond outside my window.
 "They're not afraid," you said,
  and cradled one in your arms

so I might stroke its head.
 You laughed and said,
  "You have healing hands."

I took your hands in mine,
 but we both knew that summer day
  I could not heal your cancer.

  IV

Far upriver on an island
 in the Holston, the geese have made
  their home, raise their young.

Once I walked among them, remembering
 this narrow strip as the sacred meeting
  place of the Cherokee.

These are the healing waters, this land
 the happy hunting ground.  I hear
  easy gabble, the small talk

of flock.  In the distance a lone straggler
 waddles further from me.
  What he seeks, I cannot say.

He has fed on the bitter loss,
 his lifetime mate gone.

  V

Having neither wings nor healing hands,
 O friend, what answer could
  I ever give to that call

when it comes aching
 across the miles and years?