After the Revival

After the Revival

“Carrie Jerrell is a poised, mature and brilliant poet. Her distinctive genius, what makes her unlike anybody else I know, is her ability to bring together such a heterogeneous mix of worlds and influences – to be open to everything formal and informal, profane and sacred, foreign and home grown.” – from judge Alan Shapiro’s foreword

“The poems in this book are full of idiosyncratic wit, keen social intelligence and a kind of sass that makes great use of both the honey and the sting. That’s pleasure enough to encounter, but add to this Jerrell’s enviable formal assuredness and you have a book that announces a bright new voice to contemporary American poetry.” – Erin Belieu

“After the Revival is a book of rich, tightly-packed poems suffused with the grit, rueful humor and pain of American country music.” – Dorianne Laux

"After the Revival carefully mourns the vulnerability of rural America, from its people and their ways, to its small towns, to the land itself. There’s a bell of desperation quietly ringing throughout this original and finely-observed book. Carrie Jerrell’s poems are loaded with longing and anguish; they hit the page as homemade creations, gritty systems of memory and transformation, rough-hewn and vital." – Maurice Manning

“Carrie Jerrell’s poems are as lyrically alive, intelligent, and unforgettable as Hank Williams’s best songs. A lover of paradox like John Donne, and as formally sophisticated, she moves between the divine and the profane in the blink of an eye. You can’t match this book for mature feeling and its rare, hopeful, sorrowing intelligence.” – Tom Sleigh

Reviews of After the Revival

Contemporary Poetry Review(November 2010)
"Jerrell seems able to write expertly in any form she chooses – blank verse, rhymed couplets, taut free verse, and she has a humdinger of a sestina, “The Country-Western Singer’s Ex-Wife, Sober in Mendocino County, California.” But the sonnet – exactly half the poems in After the Revival, if I’ve counted right, are sonnets – is her form of choice. The centerpiece of the book, in fact, is a sequence of seriocomic sonnets on the subject of modern American weddings. It’s a commonplace that rhymes in contemporary poetry ought to be unobtrusive, but rhyme is first and foremost something for both writer and reader to take pleasure in, and provided the poet has the chops, there’s nothing wrong with him or her showing off now and again … It’s both odd and entirely apt that After the Revival should have won the 2008 Anthony Hecht Prize. Apt in the sense that the virtuosity, wit and erotic and religious concerns on display in the collection would likely have delighted Hecht. And maybe it’s not that odd: maybe I had in mind too simplistic a contrast between Hecht’s high style – east coast, oriented toward Europe – and Jerrell’s southern and western twang. Overemphasizing that dichotomy would mean forgetting how much Hecht owed to southern poets like his teachers John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, not to mention, come to think of it, the extent to which an arch-formalist like Yvor Winters was a poet of the American west. Still, none of those poets mined the resources of the demotic as extensively as Jerrell does. Country music and the language of sermons and the Bible are more than comforts to the speaker of these poems, they’re rhetorical resources. In drawing so successfully on the texts to which many of her fellow citizens resort, with varying degrees of self-awareness, in times of heightened feeling, she’s created a poetry that’s at once genuinely popular and unabashedly literary. Not bad for a first book." – Bill Coyle

PN Review, 196(November-December 2010)
"Carrie Jerrell [is] a worthy winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize … She has a simple, but startlingly effective strategy: to set the taut rhythms and shapely stanzas won from formal education against the language of a rich, rough earlier life. Her poems embrace popular song (‘you blue jean honky-tonk angel’), shop names (‘Tater Warner’s hardware store on Main’), and the sonorous speech of the Gospels: ‘Let me testify’ … This is a poet with a future." – Alison Brackenbury

Acumen, 67, May 2010
“[I]mmediately exciting reading, poetry in an utterly distinctive voice … These poems are full of unease and energy, of humour and formal grace, anguish and allusion … She handles traditional forms splendidly – deserves a place in any modern anthology of the sonnet, and she writes a mean sestina too; she registers a particular kind of American speech without being false either to it or to the forms she uses … Her poetic voice is ‘all invitation’ in its receptiveness but the poetry she makes out of her ‘open’ voice is tightly disciplined … Assured, accomplished, zestful, wry – this is an impressive and attractive collection." – Glyn Pursglove