Sage & Disciple: New & Selected Poems

“Reading Samuel Green’s Sage & Disciple, I found myself swept up by two books at once. The first was the one I had expected—a superb new and selected volume that provided an overview of Green’s lively career as a poet. Here was half a century of work, all of it worthy of attention. As I read on, however, I found another, even more compelling book. Green’s poems gave me a startling sense of an actual life lived on its own terms. His poems have a tangible physicality, whether they are about work or travel or love. I was roused by Green’s ability to transport me into the experience he describes—the taste, smell, and feel of real life. What more could I ask of a book of poems?”

—Dana Gioia, former Director of the National Endowment for the Arts, and winner of both the American Book Award and the Poets Prize

"“Ground sense”—W. C. Williams’ term—undergirds these richly wrought, new and selected poems. Samuel Green’s work in words is to reconnect himself and his readers to the natural order and the nature of being. He seems to keep one foot in the grave and one foot in the firmament."

—Thomas Lynch, author of Bone Rosary (poems), The Depositions (essays), and No Prisoners (a novel)

"There’s a whole world of work in these poems, then a whole world of silent, exact attentiveness, then another world again of the comradeship of death, memory, suffering and grief. What I admire most is the ways in which these worlds, like artfully carved rings of pearwood, slide in and around and above and through each other so that we live in all the worlds at once and at seeming random, all those worlds that are somehow, in some strange alchemy of breath, no more and no less than the ordinary world in which we say we live, but more clearly seen."

—Theo Dorgan, former director of Poetry Ireland, and author of Once Was a Boy

"Samuel Green is a master calligrapher. He is also a masterful poet. The words he forms with his pen are as well-chosen and well-ordered and pleasing to the mind as is his script to the eye. From his first collection, Gillnets, to his magnificent, new and selected, Sage & Disciple, Green’s poems are distinguished by an unblinking and precise physicality, whether it’s the feel and click of an oar in its lock or the intricately detailed, field biologist’s description of a street scene in Viet Nam, he writes the inward experience of a life made vivid by the clarity of his eye and his narrative voice."

—Dan Gerber, author of Particles