Hope Is A Small Barn

\Finalist: Julia Ward Howe Poetry Prize


The poems in Gregory LeStage’s Hope Is A Small Barn refuse to accept easy answers to the all-important issues with which they deal. Nevertheless, they explore the human condition's most shared mysteries with an essential optimism that finds and reveals beauty in people and place. Hope is a lantern lit with words. As Fred Marchant notes, "Hope for this poet includes a deep commitment to assay both joy and sorrow, especially as these are met in family life unfolding over time. Underneath these is the hope that the shaping of words to express intense feeling is in itself worth our while and meaning-full. If, as LeStage tells us, hope is a small barn with a 'roof half open to the sky, ' here are poems that are crafted like sturdy beams, weight-bearing, reliable, and true." Richard Hoffman adds this: "In Hope Is a Small Barn, Gregg LeStage returns our poetry to sonic elegance. Each of these poems is an embodiment, a shapely figure for the poet's concerns, which are those of maturity: love and its responsibilities, mortality and its abiding questions. There is great nourishment to be found in these beautifully crafted poems. Ant this praise from Michael Ansara: "Each word in this intelligent collection of poems is precisely placed, each carefully crafted for sound, associations, beats, even, once, to form a visual image on the page. This fine new book takes us deep into the mind of an accomplished poet as he struggles to 'make my peace with all / that I could never understand / by reckoning through the archive of the inexplicable.' We are all the wiser for this poet's struggle and for the beautiful, thoughtful poems that have flowed from it."

Vaclav Havel wrote that hope was not just optimism that things will work out well, but rather a faith that what we do makes sense, regardless of the outcome. For Gregory LeStage, hope includes a child’s freshness of perception as he goes forth to discover the world. Hope for this poet also includes a deep commitment to assay both joy and sorrow, especially as these are met in family life unfolding over time. Underneath these is the hope that the shaping of words to express intense feeling is in itself worth our while and meaning-full. If, as LeStage tells us, hope is a small barn with a “roof half open to the sky,” here are poems that are crafted like sturdy beams, weight-bearing, reliable, and true.

— Fred Marchant | Author of Said Not Said

In Hope Is a Small Barn, Gregory LeStage returns our poetry to sonic elegance. The music inheres in LeStage’s poems, from syllable to syntax, and builds, like Rilke’s Orpheus, “a temple in the ear.” Each of these poems is an embodiment, a shapely figure for the poet’s concerns, which are those of maturity: love and its responsibilities, mortality and its abiding questions. There is great nourishment to be found in these beautifully crafted poems.

— Richard Hoffman | Author of Gold Star Road

“Words matter” says poet Gregory LeStage in the preface to his newest book, Hope Is a Small Barn, and then proceeds to prove the point. Each word in this intelligent collection of poems is precisely placed, each carefully crafted for sound, associations, beats, even, once, to form a visual image on the page. The collection starts with the experiences of the poet as a boy of ten and then oscillates over and through his life, always returning “to someone we all once were /some child or safe self long gone.” This fine new book takes us deep into the mind of an accomplished poet as he struggles to “make my peace with all / that I could never understand / by reckoning through the archive of the inexplicable” Poetry at its best is, indeed, our struggle with the inexplicable. We are all the wiser for this poet's struggle and for the beautiful, thoughtful, poems that have flowed from it.

— Michael Ansara | Founder and Chairman of Mass Poetry