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What's the Story? Reflections on a Life Grown Long is, in many ways, a kaleidoscopic chronicle of this ongoing search. By turns elegiac, humorous, sad, joyful, angry -and often many of these at once- this book of extremely short prose reflections entertains an abiding question for Lea: to what extent does "my" version of what happens in this life and in the world at large coincide with some imagined "real" version? If the author had an opinionated, positive answer to such a question when young, life has imposed a degree of humility upon him in older age, whether he wants it or not.
What's the Story? is less notable, then, for the conclusions it reaches at any given point than for its compelling witness to what poet Wallace Stevens called "the mind in the act of finding what will suffice."
About the author
Sydney Lea lately retired after more than forty years of teaching at Dartmouth, Yale, Wesleyan, and Middlebury Colleges, as well as at several European universities. Lea was a Pulitzer finalist for his volume of poems Pursuit of a Wound, and won the 1998 Poets' Prize. He holds the doctorate in Comparative Literature from Yale. Recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Fulbright Foundations, he founded and for thirteen years edited New England Review, one of the nation's leading literary quarterlies. This is his tenth volume of poems; he is also author of a novel, A Place in Mind, and two collections of naturalist essays, Hunting the Whole Way Home and A Little Wildness. He is currently the poet laureate of the state of Vermont.
Summary
What's the Story? Reflections on a Life Grown Long is, in many ways, a kaleidoscopic chronicle of this ongoing search. By turns elegiac, humorous, sad, joyful, angry -and often many of these at once- this book of extremely short prose reflections entertains an abiding question for Lea: to what extent does "my" version of what happens in this life and in the world at large coincide with some imagined "real" version? If the author had an opinionated, positive answer to such a question when young, life has imposed a degree of humility upon him in older age, whether he wants it or not. What's the Story? is less notable, then, for the conclusions it reaches at any given point than for its compelling witness to what poet Wallace Stevens called "the mind in the act of finding what will suffice."
