Jeffrey Greene

Photo by Stuart Dischell

Jeffrey Greene is the author of five collections of poetry, a memoir, four personalized nature books, and a book of mixed genre writing. His writing has been supported by the NEA, the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and Rinehart Fund, and he was a winner of the Samuel French Morse Prize, the Randall Jarrell Award, and the “Discovery”/ The Nation Award.  His poems, short stories, and essays have appeared numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review Online, Agni, Southwest Review and the anthologies Strangers in Paris, Intimacy, and Nothing to Declare: A Guide to Flash Sequence. He mentors for the Pan European MFA program. 

New Book:

Forests and Stringed Instruments

[T]his concise book offers a pleasing deep dive into an intriguing niche topic. A good choice for connoisseurs who appreciate musical instruments the way others do fine wine.

– Kirkus

Jeffrey Greene takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the forests of Europe and with every page richly uncovers the mysteries held within the tonewood of the finest stringed instruments ever made.

– Jeffrey Ziegler, award-winning cellist and member of the Kronos Quartet, The New School

Jeffrey Greene: The Hidden Art Behind String Instruments

Nature Writing

WALL STREET JOURNAL
Mr. Greene’s descriptions have the clarity one would expect from a poet, whether sketching the striped young boars, called marcassins, playing rough and tumble while looked over by the older sows, or recounting an old boar’s happy mud bath. . . . A fascinating portrait of rural France and its cherished rites emerges as Mr. Greene negotiates the intricacies of la France profonde.

“Interesting gem of a book. ” Kris Boyd, THINK” –KERA Dallas, NPR affiliate

WALL STREET JOURNAL
Jeffrey Greene is on a quest to see value where the rest of the world sees weeds….. his book is a meditation, with elegant musings…. You leave Mr. Greene’s book wanting to find joy in fewer, more tangible things…. As you make your way through his ‘meditation’ you realize this sentiment is not just an aspiration for life, but as Thoreau pointed out, an inevitability for all living things.

Jeffrey Greene is a wise and generous writer, navigating each wild edible through his own memories. What results is much more than a field guide; it’s a window into our relationship with the natural world. — Dan Barber

Forget farm to plate. This is a book about wild places to plate, imagination to plate, memory to plate. — Michael P. Branch
“This is a beautifully written, beautifully illustrated portrait of what happened to ‘the sorriest piece of land in Blanco County’ after J. David Bamberger and his wife, Margaret, rescued an arid, 5,000-acre spread from more than a century of neglect and misuse. Mr. Bamberger, a former door-to-door salesman who co-founded and headed Church’s Fried Chicken, has demonstrated on his land that profit incentives can be applied successfully to land restoration and nature conservation.” –Si Dunn, Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

Memoir

“Jeffrey Greene writes of France, and indeed the spirits of France with intimacy, elegance, and wit, and with apparently effortless evocation of a born writer.” 

–W.S. Merwin

William Morrow (US/Canada); HarperCollins (Australia/New Zealand); Prometheus/Bert Bakker (Holland); HarperPerennial (US/Canada); Transworld/Bantam (UK); BBArt (Czech Rep.); Varrak (Estonia).

Poetry

In Beyond Our Means, Jeffrey Greene weaves biography, social history, and observation of the natural and the human-made— and human-wrecked—world. The poems are at once tender and terrifying, infused with a dark magic and a kind of radical compassion. Their mysteriousness lies in glimpses into the glimmering possibilities of wholeness, of putting the broken world back together again. What if the wound at the neck could heal? What if the child one never had appears through the rush of leaves, in the porch light, out of breath? For a while the wind blew the rain / and you could taste it like someone else’s tears. This is achingly beautiful work. 
—Cecilia Woloch

Finalist for best poetry book of the year, Texas Institute of Letters “Just as he’s fused both beauty and beast in the rousing title poem, Jeffrey Greene finds a rich vein of integrity in his quest to reconcile our human and animal natures. There’s an apt and spirited sense of justice in his lyrical championing of vilified boars, hogs, and wolves. Beautiful Monsters is a trenchant, compassionate, blessedly sane volume in which Greene blends lively animal odes, everyday Americana, pertinent Greek myths, and meditations on mortality and time’s sweep, with a seamless, forthright grace.” —Cyrus Cassells
Selected by Carolyn Kizer for the Samuel French Morse Prize
 
Randall Jarrell’s sense of the spaciousness and challenge of the American narrative is well honored here.  This ambitious, questing poem is in ten parts.  It’s purpose, to use the poet’s words from the second section, is to touch “the many planes of reality”. . . . I admired this poem particularly because sequences are never easy to write.  They require the clearest sort of palette, the most confident brush strokes.  And – to press the likeness a little – this is a very large canvas.  Not just in the use of language, from Manhattan to Texas, but also in its changes of tone, its shifts of imagery and interference.  Nevertheless, these are beautifully managed sections, full of swift and daring changes.  But gradually the voice unfolds a portrait of both place and nation and, with it, a beautiful muted elegy for all the ironies and distances we have made of our own lives.  For all the ways we betray ourselves–Eavan Boland.
Coreopsis Prize winner;
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
“To the Left of the Worshiper is a book of rare lyrical attentiveness and sympathy, of external landscapes that signify inwards, of childhood lost and found and lost again, of separation and arrivals, of modern love and the quest for a redeeming human faith. I savor these poems for their craftsmanship, their emotional precision, and their abiding sense of the heart’s inner workings and mysteries.”
—Edward Hirsch
Times Literary Supplement
 
[I]n Shades of the Other Shore, two Americans, a poet and an artist respectively, are “translated” from the United States to rural France, with Jeffrey Greene’s short prose pieces and poems exploring “imagined correspondences between personal and historical ghosts tied to the seasons”, and Ralph Petty’s watercolours recording a journey to the source of a local river.

Contact: j.greene@orange. fr

Agent: Laura Strachan: lhstrachan@strachanlit.com