FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The University of Arkansas Press Poetry Series, edited by Enid Shomer, has two new additions to its lengthy and distinguished list. 

Gary Fincke’s The Fire Landscape (paperback, $16.00) is a series of deeply layered poem sequences that chronicles a wide variety of coming-of-age moments from childhood in the 1950s, including fears surrounding the politics of the Cold War and a nuclear bomb attack, through the beginning of the 21st century. Another sequence deals with the 1970 National Guard shooting of students at Kent State, where Fincke was a student at the time.

Poet James Harms describes Fincke’s book as a “remarkable series of poetic sequences [filled with] honest and unflinching beauty.” Gary Fincke is a professor of English and creative writing and director of the Writers Institute at Susquehanna University and a past finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. The University of Arkansas Press published another collection of Fincke’s poetry, Standing Around the Heart, in 2005.

Dannye Romine Powell’s A Necklace of Bees probes the nature of loss — loss that’s actual and loss that’s feared. In these poems, loss takes many guises. With its ferny breath, loss is sometimes the lover who waits in secret by the porch. Sometimes even loss recognizes the feeling of loss. At the heart of the collection is the poet’s dread of losing an alcoholic son.

Poet Kelly Cherry describes the poems as “lyrical, passionate, intimate, and nervy, and they respect the complex reality of love. They do not gloss, they do not lie. They tell the beautiful, painful truth.” Dannye Romine Powell lives in Charlotte, N.C., where she was for many years the book review editor at the Charlotte Observer. The University of Arkansas Press published two other collections by Powell, the award-winning The Ecstasy of Regret and At Every Wedding Someone Stays Home.