Synopses & Reviews
Poetry. "In A FAR ALLEGIANCE, Roy Scheele offers us poems with the tough elegance of bleached bones. These poems are characterized by taut lines, crisp diction, and electric imagery and a search within each poem for a perfect expressive form—sometimes rhymed, sometimes stanzaic, sometimes blank verse, always with a compelling sense of closure in the way the last line seals the bond between form and meaning. Whether recalling childhood experience in Nebraska, ruminating on the nature of memory, or recalling a scene or work of art, these poems have the integrity of the well-wrought urn"—Les Whipp.
Synopsis
Scheele offers us poems with the tough elegance of bleached bones. Whether recalling childhood experience in Nebraska, ruminating on the nature of memory, or recalling a scene or work of art, these poems have the integrity of the well-wrought urn.--Les Whipp, Professor Emeritus of English, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
About the Author
As an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska in the early and mid-1960s, Roy Scheele studied with Karl Shapiro and attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, where he met Robert Frost, John Ciardi, and John Frederick Nims. Scheele holds a B.A. in classical Greek and an M.A. in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and has taught classics at Nebraska and Creighton University and English at the University of Tennessee at Martin, a gymnasium in Germany, and Doane College in Crete, Nebraska, where he is currently associate professor of English and Poet-in-Residence. Scheele's poems, critical essays, and interviews and profiles have been widely published in such distinguished journals as Poetry, Poets and Writers, Prairie Schooner, The New England Review, The Southern Review, and numerous university and little magazines. His poems have been frequently anthologized, most notably in Strong Measures (Harper and Row, 1986), and his interviews with Hayden Carruth, Miroslav Holub, and W. D. Snodgrass have been reprinted in The Verse Book of Interviews and elsewhere. Scheele's first book-length collection of poems, Pointing Out the Sky (Sandhills Press, 1985), was a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America, and he has won several first-place awards in the World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets international poetry competitions. In 1993 he received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council.