In these poems poetry focuses on landscape as the route into the human psyche, the nature of language, the role of memory and the metaphor for narrative meaning. Rich in imagery, Chiles’ poetry is at once dense and layered while remaining lucid and accessible.
Short listed for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
Judges’ Comments:
Evening Land is a new land in the hands of Adam Chiles, who can evoke with a single stroke—deft, taut, surprising, sure—seasons and landscapes both wounded and singing. Holding at its core a powerful long poem of war, Evening Land breathes from trench to mind to field to heart to heart to roof to tree to gut and back again with remarkable lucidity and control. This is a mature work, worthy music charged with lyrical intensity.
Adam Chiles‘ work has appeared in such journals as Barrow Street, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Magma, Other Poetry and Painted Bride Quarterly. first collection Evening Land was shortlisted for the 2009 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book in Canada. He currently lives just outside Washington DC with his wife Emily and son Noah and is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northern Virginia Community College.