Richard Lyons will be at Burke’s on Friday, February 24, from 5:00 to 6:30 PM to read from and sign copies of his new collection of poems, Fleur Carnivore (Word Works, $10.00 softcover), winner of the 2005 Washington Prize. The reading will begin at 6 PM.
"In the poems of Fleur Carnivore, memory is as a key that keeps refusing to fit in its lock, though it's the only key, though we keep on trying it. Lyons knows it is the very chanciness of memory that keeps the present alive with possibility, and he brings these poems, remarkably, over and over again, to that epiphanic place at which 'everything seems on fire.' This is a book of tremendous heat and delicacy, incredibly painterly and yet richly meditative."
"Lyons poems are exploratory, nervy, emotionally rich, and yet at the same time possess a keen command of craft. During a time when a period style favors glibness and caution, the urgency and intelligence of these poems are very welcome things indeed."
A former winner of the Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets, Richard Lyons received a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts, an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona, and a Ph.D from the University of Houston. He has published poems in numerous journals among them The Nation, Poetry, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and The North American Review. In 1988, Deborah Digges selected his first collection These Modern Nights as a Devins Award winner in the University of Missouri Press Breakthrough Series. In 2000, Richard Howard selected his second collection Hours of the Cardinal for the James Dickey Contemporary Poets Series at the University of South Carolina Press.He now teaches at Mississippi State University where he is the director of the creative writing emphasis.