About the Book
Vocation is a poetry collection that examines the many ways of viewing the work of a life and all that contributes to it. The book's first section, "The Voices," evokes the various individuals whose lives and voices resonate with the narrator and contribute to his identity. The influence of parents and grandparents, as well as locations and objects associated with them, dominate the initial portion of the book. The second section, "The Callings," examines vocations or directions in life as growing, for better or worse, out of external influences or internal compulsions. Whether we are "called" to a life of writing, photography, medicine, or police work, we may find that there are sacrifices, as well as satisfactions, that accompany our choices. The volume's third section, "The Work," continues to address specific vocations but deepens into a consideration of attitudes that may grow out of our work. Several of the poems here bring up issues in teaching and learning, often drawn from the poet's own life in the classroom or at his writing desk. Others are more tangential to these pursuits but connect metaphorically with them. The book's final section, "The Path," contains several poems about travel that imply a kind of searching that may supersede the simple quest for new experience and may take us inward even as we launch ourselves into unfamiliar territory. Sometimes there are spiritual, if not religious, elements in our experiments toward making our way in life and work. The poems in Vocation display a variety of forms, including ekphrastic verse, in which the writer turns to paintings or photographs that in some way reflect his experience.
About the Author :
Ken Autrey lives in Auburn, Alabama, where he helps coordinate the Third Thursday Poetry Series. He earned degrees from Davidson College, Auburn University, and the University of South Carolina. He is an Emeritus Professor of English at Francis Marion University in South Carolina, where he taught poetry, creative nonfiction, and advanced composition. Previously, he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ghana and taught at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. He spent one year as a visiting professor at Hiroshima University in Japan. Autrey's work has appeared in Chattahoochee Review, Cimarron Review, Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, Texas Review and many other journals. He has published four chapbooks: Pilgrims (Main Street Rag), Rope Lesson (Longleaf Press), The Wake of the Year (Solomon and George Press), and Penelope in Repose (Evening Street Press). A full-length collection, Circulation, was published by Dos Madres Press. He is married to Janne Debes. They have two daughters and six grandchildren.
Review :
Ken Autrey, author of Vocation, works his craft of verbal artistry through four thematic parts and summons memories that have remained relevant. Of his father, he writes about sorting through "shards and remnants he left behind." From paintings, photographs, and travel memories Autrey shares his world with keen observations of his past that mirror many of our own memories: the barber's "snip and shear," and "the sound of fading train whistles." A world traveler, he illuminates the allure of exotic places: "Night descends like a mellow curtain." Throughout Vocation, Autrey's poems, with their striking details, echo connections to familiar insights that will linger and satisfy beyond the first reading.
-Wendy Cleveland, author of Blue Ford
Robert Frost wrote "The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows." Ken Autrey's Vocation is a book deeply invested in fact, memory, voices, and labor. These poems are made with the tenacity of labor and an observant eye turned to the work of the hands - his, and his ancestors. It is a redemptive and redeeming labor; dare I say a salvific and transcendent (secular) labor yielding to joy?
-Hank Lazer, author of Abundant Life: New & Selected Poems
These poems claim poignant ground, with some especially moving in their reverie. The memories and the wisdom that grows from simple things mark these poems with comfort. They take their firm anchoring in truth, distinguishing this collection.
-Robert Parham, author of The Relentlessness of Salvation
