New and Selected Poems

By Marjory Wentworth and Carol Ann Davis

An inspiring assortment of new and "best of" works by South Carolina's poet laureate

New and Selected Poems includes more than fifty poems from Marjory Wentworth's previous three collections, Noticing Eden, Despite Gravity, and The Endless Repetition of an Ordinary Miracle, plus twenty-eight new poems. This collection serves as a capstone to Wentworth's tenure as South Carolina poet laureate, a title she has held since 2003.

Thematically Wentworth's poems invite us to view nature as a site of reflection and healing, to consider the power of familial bonds and friendships, and to broaden our awareness of human rights and social justice. Regional settings appear throughout, indicative of Wentworth's commitment to represent her adopted home state of South Carolina in her work. She skillfully employs a variety of forms, from prose poems to sonnets to elegies to list poems, making for a rich and interesting trek through this "best of" collection of her poems to date.

This collection includes a foreword by the poet Carol Ann Davis, author of Psalm and Atlas Hour and assistant professor of English at Fairfield University.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Mar 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781611173239

Marjory Wentworth

Marjory Wentworth is the New York Times bestselling author of Out of Wonder, Poems Celebrating Poets (with Kwame Alexander and Chris Colderley) and many other works and poems. Her poems have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize six times. She is the current poet laureate of South Carolina. Wentworth serves on the Board of Advisors at The Global Social Justice Practice Academy, and she is a 2020 National Coalition Against Censorship Free Speech is for Me Advocate. She teaches courses in writing, social justice, and banned books at The College of Charleston.  Marjory first met Dottie in the early 2000s at a party; the next evening Dottie showed up at her door with a bottle wine and Marjory’s first book of poems and asked her if she could include one of her poems in the front of her forthcoming novel, Plantation.  Their mutual love of the South Carolina low country bonded them, and their friendship was immediate. Both women were married to men named Peter; even their children were the same ages, and they remain friends to this day. Sometimes friends become family, and it doesn’t get better than that.  

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