Description

At Home with the Dreamlike Earth

by Steven Croft

In At Home with a Dreamlike Earth, Steven Croft explores the natural beauty in his birth-state of Georgia, where his poems bring the reader to the lush coastal landscapes of the Barrier Islands and the nurturing comforts of Southern living.

Enjoy a Video of Steven Reading from the Book:

Steven Croft — A Featured Poet on The Poetry Box LIVE (Jan 2024)

Early Praise:

At Home with the Dreamlike Earth drew me into a solace of coastal Southern landscapes – the Ichetucknee and Alapaha, back roads to Alabama, fish crows, one-room schoolhouses, Beautyberry. Steven Croft’s deft, sensory lyrics, impressionistic in the best painterly sense of that word, alternate with gripping narratives like “Conversion,” in which a farmer watches a lightning-sparked fire burn across his fields toward his home. In “Alapaha” and “Azaleas,” seeing new blooms in the landscapes his grandfather and grandmother knew before he did, the poet feels their presence in the wild, ongoing life of these places. This chapbook lifted me, poem by poem, as gradually and gracefully as a Georgia high tide.”

—Gordon Johnston, author of Scaring the Bears 
and Where Here Is Hard to Say 

In At Home with the Dreamlike Earth, the poet, Steven Croft, welcomes the reader into his world, primarily St. Simons Island, a beautiful and haunting barrier island off the coast of Georgia. These poems paint pictures in which “crooked oaken branches drape skeins of moss” and pay homage to the quiet moments of life, some of them forced upon us, as in “Still Life on the St. Simons Causeway, Eastbound Traffic Stopped by an Accident.” Readers will enjoy Croft’s gift for words in expressions such as the moon’s “ceramic stoicism,” and beautiful lines: “Where night’s invisible heart sits so still on the earth / no one could want the sun to come, kill the ceiling / of silent stars.”

—Connie Jordan Green, author of Darwin’s Breath

These liminal poems spirit-walk through the storied landscapes of the coastal plains south, seeking the nurturing presence of nature. Theirs is a kind of wild abandon, at times unnerving, often elegiac, as if everything “vanishes to dusk.” When I read this beautiful work, I find myself holding my breath, waiting and watching. Mythic in scope, layered with meaning, Steven Croft’s poetry strips bare a deep longing for the places that live in memory, in history, in the dark soil. In this powerful collection Croft holds his compass still; it points us toward a wildness none of us can forget

—Janisse Ray, author of Red Lanterns

About the Author:

Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia on a property lush with vegetation. He is the author of three previous chapbooks: Coastal Scenes (The Saltmarsh Press, 2002), Moment and Time (The Saltmarsh Press, 2015), and New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, Chestnut Review, North of Oxford, Anti-Heroin Chic, The New Verse News, Soul-Lit, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.