George Drew was born in Mississippi and raised there and in New York State, where he currently lives. He is the author of two collections of poetry, most recently The Horse’s Name Was Physics, from Turning Point Press; a third, The Hand that Rounded Peter’s Dome, will be released by Turning Point in 2010. American Cool is Drew's second collection from Tamarack Editions, the first his first collection, Toads in a Poisoned Tank (1986). Drew has published widely in suchjournals as Antioch Review, Atlanta Review, The Baltimore Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cutthroat, Louisiana Literature, Mississippi Review, New Millennium Writings, North American Review, Salmagundi, and The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review. He is the winner of the 2003 Paumanok Poetry Award, the 2007 Stephen Dunn Poetry Award, the 2007 Baltimore Review Prize, and the 2008 South Carolina Review Poetry Prize. For more information, please visit www.georgedrew.com. (Photo credit: Christopher Drew)

George Drew demonstrates his mastery of a variety of forms and voices in his third collection, American Cool. Although working within the lyrical mode, Drew's poems never lack elements of narrative that draw the reader into the wonder, the mystery, and the horror of life in the contemporary United States.

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“Not to examine all this beauty,” George Drew writes in the first poem of American Cool, would be “unconscionable,” even in the face of the fear and darkness we know as human beings. Drew is “someone who won’t turn away” from that darkness—nor from death, nothingness, or even, in the book’s compelling title poem, meaningless brutality. And yet, like Keats, one of the many forebears to whom he pays homage in these pages, Drew knows that the poet’s first allegiance is to beauty. These poems are “like cliffs in winter/icy in opposition and beautiful.” —Jeffrey Harrison, Incomplete Knowledge and The Names of Things: New and Selected Poems

Many of George Drew’s poems, most of them, are elegiac; they suit my mood perfectly. Yet in their language they give me a bedrock pleasure that underlies all the gloom of reality. There couldn’t be a more clear or constant paradigm of the strange efficacy of art in human experience. —Hayden Carruth, winner of the National Book Award and National Book Critics Award

Once again George Drew serves up a feast of poems that are at once accessible and challenging, drawing us into a renewed alertness. In this, his third book, the voice that has all along demonstrated its authenticity, has become sharper-honed and, if this is possible, even more authentic. If you haven’t read him before, let this book bring you into the country of George Drew, which is our country, our world illuminated. —Steven Huff, The Water We Came From and More Daring Escapes

I HAVE SPENT THE AFTERNOON WITH ELVIS

I have spent the afternoon with Elvis,
me sitting in a canvas chair on the porch
of a cabin, him shaking his hips so hard
leaves on the red oak flutter like scarves.

Growing tired of him and his unruly hips
I stroll up the road, but it’s not easy
to escape the Elvis that Elvis has become.
A car goes by, a blur of engine and guitar.

Silence returns and it’s nearly unbearable.
It’s the horrible dead air between a last
note with all the fizz of a flat Coke
and Sam Philips’ showy explosive groan.

The elders lied. Silence is not art deco,
not Beale Street on a sizzling Memphis night.
Silence is monotone, it’s a song unsung.
Silence is an audience that never comes.

THE DAY I STOPPED BY RF’S GRAVE

To Gray Jacobik

I tell you, the car that not two hours earlier
had crashed through the plate-glass window
and spun the table and me in a half circle
and sent glass and poems and coffee flying
most definitely left me with a deep desire
for trees that bend and set you gently down
with nothing but your shadow flat on the ground.

And too it was a beautiful autumn day,
in the thirties and the sky a stern blend of blue
and gray, a cold wind moving
through the leaves half covering the stone,
leaves from the large maples that surely
he would have approved of, leaves that were
another burst of gold that wouldn’t stay.

Then there were the several crows
that shook down on me a storm
of leaves, and a pair of squirrels
loudly denouncing my violation of their day.

Mostly it was that I was alone high
above the hubbub of Bennington,
that I could stop there by Frost’s grave
with his and Elinor’s ashes under my feet
and hearken back to Rome, how once
on another November day I’d stood alone
in the blue room from which John Keats
had climbed toward Heaven, and stayed.

Oh, it was almost too much—the leaves,
the squirrels, the stone, the crows,
and to the east the mountains’ sunset glow—
and soon I turned away, shuffling
back out of all that as just too much to bear.

I tell you, Gray, I hardly believed it myself,
but I swear I heard bells in the gathering dark.

AMERICAN COOL

For Robert Cording

So you ask why we did it,
why we stabbed and slashed
and slit their throats as
if we were slicing cheese.

How could two typical kids
from the suburbs do it?—
kids, after all, like yours,
like the kids of your friends.

You chalk it up to some
hatred you’ve never felt
and can’t be expected
to ever really understand.

Vaguely you feel a guilt,
some communal itch
that won’t let you repent,
sin in any real sense

something you’ve read
about, but once out
of church on Sundays not
believable, let alone extant.

Please note the language:
extant. Any perceived lack
of education won’t hold up.
Our schools were first-rate.

What’s left of reason, then?
Bad genes? No more than yours.
Karma? No one since Lennon
believes in spiritual scams.

Maybe a deep-seated need
for thrills? Some human need
for more? No—it was nothing
if not boring, matter of fact.

And don’t try saying we’re
mental. All the shrinks you
sent us to agree: we exemplify
run of the mill American cool.

That leaves genuine evil,
the anti-Word made flesh,
our flesh the garbage bin
of the Foul and Loathsome.

Evil exists all right,
but sorry—the blood
we spilled that night
wasn’t close to mythic,

spattered as it was on walls,
on rugs, furniture, on us.
Evil is as evil does,
but it did nothing for us.

It was blood, that’s all,
like any other blood thick,
and red the moment it
hit the air-conditioned air.

Face it, hate had nothing
to do with it. It was just
little about nothing. That’s
what scares you. Isn’t it?