Mastery's End

Jeffrey Gray's Mastery's End reads as a complex and intelligent unpacking of the trope of travel. It's a metaphor that in his hands allows us to better understand not only each of the four main poets discussed but—in the long run—ourselves as well. This study is a significant and vital contribution to our understanding of contemporary American and Caribbean poetry.

* author of Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius *

This is a great book—and in two distinct ways. It is the most capacious guide to recent and contemporary American poetry now available. And it provides a radically new and productive approach to considering the entwined relations between travel and literature. If scholars weren't interested in those topics before, they will be now.

* editor of The New Anthology of American Poetry *

Jeffrey Gray, himself, as he tells us, a veteran traveler, has produced an intriguing and highly original study on the centrality of travel in post-World War II American poetry. Travel, as Gray defines it, means disorientation and destabilization, the loss of certainty and familiarity, the condition of homelessness. From Elizabeth Bishop, for whom ‘travel’ became the condition of life, to the exilic writing of Derek Walcott, the mental travels of John Ashbery, and the conception of travel as the hunt for a new language in Lyn Hejinian's Oxota, Gray provides us with our own critical journey through the realms of late-twentieth-century poetic consciousness. Most of the poets discussed here have been written about frequently, but Gray sheds genuinely new light on the momentum of their work.

* author of Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary *

Jeffrey Gray’s remarkable book, Mastery’s End, carries the reader on an exhilarating journey down many unexpected paths. As a seasoned traveler and a wise literary critic, Gray explores the creative and inventive forms in which American poets have encountered and expressed their worlds. From Bishop’s Ouro Preto and Lowell’s 'mud smooth path' to Walcott’s 'Tropic Zone' and Ashbery’s 'sun-blackened landscape,' Gray reveals the dazzling variety and complexity of contemporary lyrics that express the fears, uncertainty, nostalgia, longing, and pleasures of perceiving the familiar, the new, the foreign, the unknown.

* University of California, Riverside *

This volume allows the reader to meet these familiar poets on new ground, to hear texts in voices at once familiar and new.

Through Gray’s original and revealing readings of poems concerning travel, one learns much about the state of postmodernity.

The close readings in Mastery’s End are so smart and so generous that one finishes the book hoping that Gray turns next to an even wider-ranging study of contemporary poetry.