Sydney Lea

Sydney Lea Poems

Sydney Lea Biography

Sydney Lea is an American poet, novelist, essayist, editor, and professor, and is the Poet Laureate of Vermont. His most recent book is A Little Wildness: Some Notes on Rambling (Storyline Press, 2006), and he has a ninth collection of poetry, Young of the Year, now out from Four Way Books. He has taught for the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program at Dartmouth College, and at Yale University, Wesleyan University, Vermont College, Middlebury College, Franklin College, and the National Hungarian University. He founded New England Review in 1977 and edited it till 1989. His work has appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives in Newbury, Vermont. His work "Mudtime" has been set as a long form song cycle for voice and string quartet by the composer Joseph Hallman which the poet described as “a high point of my term as poet laureate. It’s been so refreshing and so different, a great shot in the arm.”,. It was premiered in 2014 by Hallman's long term collaborator, Abigail Haynes-Lennox and the 802 Quartet at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.)

The Best Poem Of Sydney Lea

Recession

A grotesquerie for so long we all ignored it:
The mammoth plastic Santa lighting up
On the Quik-Stop's roof, presiding over pumps
That gleamed and gushed in the tarmac lot below it.

Out back, with pumps of their own, the muttering diesels.
And we, for the most part ordinary folks,
Took all for granted: the idling semis' smoke,
The fuel that streamed into our tanks, above all

Our livelihoods. We stepped indoors to talk
With friends, shared coffee, read the local paper,
Heavy with news of hard times now. We shiver.
Our afternoons are gone. At five o'clock

—Once we gave the matter little thought—
Our Santa Claus no longer flares with light.

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