About the Book…

Denton Loving’s second collection of poetry centers on the bond that endures between father and son, even after death. In plainspoken poetry that is often narrative in form, the writer’s personal experiences living on an inherited cattle farm and tending to an aging orchard are detailed. Loving explores and celebrates the physical and psychological landscapes of his native Appalachia—its mountains and valleys, its flora and fauna—with language that is lyrical and bursting with sudden shocks of emotional power. These are poems that serve as witness to the natural world, blurred with history and mythology to examine the eternal father-son paradigm. Readers will be reminded why Ron Rash has said that “Denton Loving has the talent to convey what he has seen that we too might see, and feel, and know deeply.”

“Whether writing narrative or lyric, based on lived experience or a photograph from the Ekphrastic Poetry Project, these are poems that refuse to settle.” — Matthew Duffus, Southern Review of Books

“Denton Loving’s Tamp reminds us that to grieve is to love, a sacred act that aims for clarity, and yet, mourning, too, makes us acutely aware of the profound questions that agitate the living. Loving’s poems, deeply attuned to the richness of a rural sacred order, both honor and attempt to name that complexity with a music that feels movingly restorative.” — Major Jackson, author of The Absurd Man

“The Cumberland Gap farmland where Denton Loving lives suffuses the atmosphere of his poems in consistently powerful ways. Loving’s memorable debut collection, 2015’s Crimes Against Birds, established his ability to engage the orchards, cattle grazing fields, and barn lofts of his upbringing with fresh, original observations… Now, with Tamp, Loving has deepened his vision with the ever-present undertow of grief, speaking to the aftermath of his father’s death.” — Emily Choate, Chapter 16

“Tamp is not a book to be entered lightly. The poems have been crafted with the grave digger’s precision.” — Ace Boggess, Change Seven

“Each poem in Tamp is a world in its own right: each a timeless praise song to the earth, to solitude, loss, and love. With bucolic sensitivity shared by few, Loving has crafted the most convincing wake-up call–gentle, surefooted, hypnotic, and insistent. Tamp is a rare trove of honest, measured assurance, a blessed reminder of what matters most.” — Shawna Kay Rodenberg, author of Kin: A Memoir

“Loving’s collection is an effective and evocative example of intimacy. We come to care about the loss of the father and the grief of the speaker because Loving forges this intimacy between reader and writer. This is how we turn a complicated emotional state like grief into the structures of art—in the case of Denton Loving, a collection of poems that saturates us in this grief process, one that never forgets loss and also never abandons connection. — Renée K. Nicholson, Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal

“In Tamp, his radiant new collection of odes and elegies, Denton Loving represents the works and days of rural Appalachia, and far beyond, with deep knowledge and delicate authenticity. Loving’s poems occupy the ideal cross-section between two of poetry’s oldest poles, the lyric and the narrative. It matters little whether readers greet these poems as stories that sing or lyrics that bind us in their telling, because the scenes and voices we discover will travel with us deep as treasured memories. Galway Kinnell once said that another word for poetry could be ‘tenderness,’ and this is the quality Loving brings most acutely to the loved people and places he offers tribute in Tamp.” — Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days

“…a deeply satisfying collection with a low-key but absolute seriousness as Loving explores what he has experienced. I don’t think I have ever read poems that appear to claim so little yet accomplish and move us so much with their perfect alignment of word-to-subject.” — Meredith Sue Willis, Books for Readers #228

“Denton Loving’s Tamp challenges the notion of elegy–the traditional view typically lensed in three stages: lament, praise, and solace. Contemporary collections surrounded by grief adhere often to a creative decision to “make it bright,” but Loving reminds us that grief is tenacious in its nature.” — Stephen Furlong, Delta Poetry Review

“Loving has an uncanny ability to marry image and abstraction in ways that are unforgettable and will have me returning to his collection again and again.” — Kristy Snedden, Anti-Heroin Chic

Order Tamp directly from Mercer University Press, Bookshop.org, City Lights in Sylva, North Carolina, Amazon or wherever books are sold.