Episodes from poet’s life are recounted in essays | DON NOBLE

Students at the University of Alabama in the late ’60s and early ’70s will remember James Seay. Tall, slender, with long brown hair, and a black eye patch over his right eye, Seay taught poetry writing and was a presence.

His first book, “Let Not Your Hart,” won the prestigious Wesleyan Prize for poetry in 1970. The verse is luminously accessible, a miracle by today’s standards, and many concern his childhood in Mississippi, in Panola County — just east of the Delta.

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Seay wrote of poverty. A poem about fishing for catfish by hand, grabbling in Yokna Bottom, concludes “The well-fed do not wade this low river.”

There are poems of hard work, often amusing and admiring.

“Kelly Dug a Hole” is a hymn of praise to simple tasks done perfectly. “Kelly’s hole was true.” If, one day, the building collapses, the last part to fail will be where Kelly dug.

And there is of course a poem about shopping, with his father, for a glass eye after losing his eye to a lawn mower. The boy knows the salesman “would not find my soft brown eye, not in a thousand leather trays.”

Now, half a century and six volumes of poetry later, James Seay has published a book of 20 essays, “Come! Come! Where? Where?: Essays.”

The first — and the last — speak of a loss even greater than the loss of his eye. Seay and his ex-wife, Lee Smith, lost their son Josh to mental illness and early death at 33.

Several return to the themes of “Let Not Your Hart.” Some recount stories of laboring and as foreman of laborers.

In the ironically titled “Big Boss Man,” set in 1959, he is supervising a crew of Black and white workers constructing a classroom building at Ole Miss. The racial and class currents are almost too complex to relate. The Black workers work with and are separate from the white workers. The blue-collar whites resent Seay, the educated boy and their boss. But he concludes, generously, that the surliest among them is just trying to feed his family.

The essays are scattered through time and space.

There are several accounts of fishing trips, a few of literary commentary, and a fresh essay on some places in Faulkner that are Seay’s own places.

The funniest piece is “Avian Voices: Trying Not To Kill a Mockingbird.” In addition to giving musical pleasure, mockingbirds can be very irritating

One favorite is his 1987 visit or attempted visit to Chekhov’s grave. That day there happened to be a funeral for a Soviet official. The guard was under orders to allow no one else into the cemetery.

Seay explained, pled, that he might never again be in the country. “Nyet.”

Desperate to be admitted, Seay has his translator tell the guard “I am a relative of Chekhov”: “My adult life has been given to the cause of literature.”

And that’s the truth.

Don Noble’s newest book is Alabama Noir, a collection of original stories by Winston Groom, Ace Atkins, Carolyn Haines, Brad Watson, and eleven other Alabama authors.

“Come! Come! Where? Where?: Essays”

Author: James Seay

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 2024

Pages: 174

Price: $22.95

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Episodes from poet’s life are recounted in essays | DON NOBLE