3 Questions with Sydney Lea

We are pleased to present our latest “3 Questions”, this time featuring Sydney Lea.
Mr. Lea, a poet and a former Pulitzer finalist, founded and for thirteen years edited New England Review. He has been active in literacy efforts and conservation, especially in Maine, where the land trust he chaired until 2018 conserved nearly 400,000 acres of working forest.

Mr. Lea will visit the Norwich Bookstore at 7 pm on Wednesday, November 13 to discuss Here, his thirteenth book of poetry and his twentieth book. 

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1.What three books have helped shape you into the writer you are today, and why?

Most important was Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, for showing that compelling poetry could be based on quotidian events and people.  I couldn’t choose a single Robert Frost book, but his fusing of formalist technique with an astonishing  rendition of common human speech remains exemplary. The last book on this list may seem a bit eccentric: Voss, by Australian novelist Patrick White, whose eye for detail simply grabbed me when I was starting as a poet. There are moments in my first book that are all but plagiaristic in this regard.  ​

2.What author (living or dead) would you most like to have a cup of coffee with and why? 

That would be the novelist Anne Tyler, I suspect, because I believe I share with her a fascination with family values, to use a much-abused phrase, with the wide range of subjects implicit (I think of Wordsworth again) in everyday domesticity.

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3.What books are currently on your bedside table?

I keep re-reading my friend David Huddle’s new poetry collection– his best in my view– My Surly Heart. I also regard the short story as literature’s most challenging genre, one at which I have very rarely succeeded myself; my attraction reflects my poetry’s strong interest in narrative. At all events, I am re-reading the brilliant Lorrie Moore’s Bark. Wow. Talk about an original sensibility! I’m also re-reading the late Larry Brown’s Big Bad Love, which shows, these years after I first encountered it, a slight but disconcerting trace of sexism; but oh, the man could write!