Scenery and Agriculture

David Beach has written a collection of nature poems that reject easy ideas of romanticism or landscape poetry. Although the poems have a deep connection to the landscape, they tend to focus on the everyday rather than the scenic, on the matters at hand rather than grand themes; these are poems to be read in any circumstance, but particularly where society is confronted with nature and the effects humans have wrought upon it. The winner of the 2008 Prize in Modern Letters from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Beach is a kind of antipoet, reflexively suspicious of language’s ability to dazzle or seduce and thriving on the disjunction between high-flown literary associations and the insistently prosaic.