Mark Sanders

Mark Sanders's "poems possess rare poise, an intelligence that sees the world in all its complexity yet conveys his vision clearly, without fuss, without second-guessing.  I had been following his work before Conditions of Grace; I admired his hard-earned intimacy with nature, his benign wit, and his comprehension of animal life, plant life, daily life.  But after I read Conditions, I understood that he has become a master of poetry."

Kelly Cherry, Poetry

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"Mark Sanders writes, he says, in 'plain speech for a plain people.'  But the complexities of his social and familial involvements, his awareness of self and others, mean that the lives rendered [in his work] are anything but plain.  They are ornery, funny, bedeviled, passionate, private, and performative--I mean, the people and Sanders's poems.  This poet is of the same important tribe as Ted Kooser and Jo McDougall, Dave Etter and Jim Barnes,  . . . possessed of a fine range of tones that can morph from the harrowing to the hilarious."

David Baker, poetry editor of The Kenyon Review

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"Mark Sanders is a keen observer, a careful translator of experience and an archivist of the actual.  He can 'turn sharp on a country thought' or channel Wallace Stevens, and his Conditions of Grace displays and utters a vital world of hawks, horses, and humane humans either wrestling with sorrow or 'downing shots of Comfort.'  His poems are deft and significant, and I'm betting most readers who find their way to [his books] will not be eager to find their way out."

R. T. Smith, editor of Shenandoah

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"This is a poet who no matter what will not be brought to silence, who will not be daunted, who persists . . . .  Ernest Hemingway honored, above all, 'grace under stress.'  He would find much to praise in [Sanders's poetry]."

Greg Kuzma, Prairie Schooner

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"Thank goodness for the straight talk of Mark Sanders' expansive poetry.  His work is plumb, level, and square--so well-wrought and aesthetically right that the lyric narrative leans into you like an old friend.  You rightly feel, when reading him, that his 'fingers lie upon the pulse of our days.'  You cannot limit this poet's work to the Great Plains--it is often anthologized as such--for his poetry is the poetry of endless possibilities.  And though age is ever upon us all, you connect, yeah Lord, you connect with the Old Man persona of several poems who has 'the map to where spirits go' and knows 'there's the countryside, flat and treeless, the horizon, the horizon, the horizon.'  This book feels like the America you want to go on and on, and you will want to read it again and again."

Jim Barnes, author of Sundown Explains Nothing:  New and Selected Poems

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"Sanders is a poet attuned to the sustaining mysteries of the places we call home, as well as the graces and frailties of the human heart, and In a Good Time only extends his considerable range. It is a book of midnight moments and dry seasons, of the inexorable passing of years, of the ways we grow old and our bodies fail—and even so, with 'a lucky hour' here or there, we might grow into our best selves."

Joe Wilkins, author of Fall Back Down When I Die and When We Were Birds 

 

"Here is an unblinking eye we can trust, a voice we can believe when Mark Sanders says: 'Loveliness endures, even in grief./ Loss felt is never really loss but keeping.' Our work, like his, may well include close observation of life and its ghosts.

Marjorie Saiser, author of The Woman in the Moon

 

"Blessedly, Mark Sanders’s poetry will never leave the local, Nebraska or Texas or while traversing the world itself. Sweeping the leaves from his porch, the poet invites us into his house full of the ghosts of childhood, of orchards and tractors. The hands of the watch remain fixed, allowing us a delicious, intimate consolation together of all that was lost, all preserved. In a Good Time was written for me and for you, too."

Glenna Luschei, benefactor of the Glenna Luschei Endowed Editorship and Fund for     Excellence at Prairie Schooner and the African Poetry Prize