Modern School Research Seminar

Poetry Reading by Spencer Reece

Spencer Reece is an emerging American poet who has won acclaim for his collection, The Clerk’s Tale (2004), which also won the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize.  Before that he had written poems in obscurity and isolation for a number of years, while working mainly as an assistant manager in Brooks Brothers Men’s Outfitters, first in St Paul, Minnesota, then in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.  The title poem of his collection describes life in the store. Much earlier he did an MA in Renaissance Literature here at the University of York; his thesis is on George Herbert and John Donne.  Writing in the introduction to The Clerk’s Tale, Louise Glück observes: ‘by turns harrowing, comic, poignant, each [sequence] combines detached, elaborate refinements of scrutiny with an eerily skittish mobility of focus, so that the poems both see deeply and move nervously, like an animal in panic.  It is a an effect I have never quite seen before, half cocktail party, half passion play’.  Spencer Reece who was recently ordained, is currently a visitor at the Iglesia Catedral del Redentor, Madrid.

Contact: Lawrence Rainey