Author Description

Shawn Callaway Hays reincarnates the American promise of Whitman's original volume of poems more realized--Grass That Leaves Greener--evolving his formidable project to a new apex--New Eschatons and Egresses--forcing this dialectic into its new literary modalities: Hays's polemical recapitulations of Great Are the Myths, Song of Myself, and Song of the Answerer. In Grass That Leaves Greener, Hays's poetry is a praise to the process of dialectical progress, exploring the escapisms--the "eschatons and egresses"--of the human condition through his narratively developmental themes of existentialism, mythology, theology, hermeneutics, epic poetry, and other literary allusions. Opening the literary ossuaries fresh, the continuance of Western poetic themes are reestablished through literary evocations in Hays's epigraphs that echo the archetypes of each of his stanzas. Like Hopkins's ruminations of God, Hays's metaphysic--presented in the existential "struggle for faith"--grounds his aesthetic as the "struggle for self-realization," assimilating the English poetic method of expansion in Milton with the American poetic process of actualization in Whitman. From his acute thesis of tragic poetic works concerning "Doom" to his antithetical themed lyrics-"Undone"-that focus on interior deteriorations, Hays's Grass That Leaves Greener crests in its surprising crescendo of "Doom Undone," his resilient synthesis of reorienting "deaths that this triune I must die and die to be raised alive." In Grass That Leaves Greener, Hays depicts a dialectic of competitive poetic tensions that can chant us into resurrection. Hays's sculpted investigations--palpable, handsome, prescriptive--ensnare us in why we make our pilgrimages to the sublimating altar of art.