No Doubt the Nameless 

No Doubt the Nameless delves the depths of elegy, yet moves at last into as positive a reading Sydney Lea’s poems have ever shown of the human situation. Here are familiar rural characters, whose sturdiness and joy figure as strongly into Lea’s narratives, both overt and implied, as do their trials and misfortunes.

Lea founded New England Review in 1977 and edited it until 1989. Of his eleven previous poetry collections, Pursuit of a Wound was one of three finalists for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The preceding volume, To the Bone: New and Selected Poems, won the 1998 Poets’ Prize. In 1989, Lea also published the novel A Place in Mind with Scribner. His 1994 collection of naturalist essays, Hunting the Whole Way Home, was re-issued in paper by the Lyons Press in 2003. Lea has received fellowships from the Rockefeller, Fulbright and Guggenheim Foundations, and has taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Wesleyan, Vermont and Middlebury Colleges, as well as at Franklin College in Switzerland and the Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest. His stories, poems, essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated and many other periodicals, as well as in more than fifty anthologies.