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.”

“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

“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

“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

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