Book cover for Produce Wagon: New and Selected Poems by Roy Scheele

Produce Wagon

New and Selected Poems

2022 Released
238 Pages
3-4 Hours
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University of Nebraska PressISBN 9781496230577
The poems in Produce Wagon explore the vast and varied circumstances of the human experience. Roy Scheele delves into his love for his wife in "Remembrances," the opening poem from his first chapbook, and "Driving after Dark"; his fascination with the natural world in poems such as "How the Fox Got Away" and "Late Autumn Woods"; his appreciation of his family in "A Kitchen Memory" and "The Long Rise"; and his fondness for stories in "The Carny Circuit" and "In the Clear." In these and the other poems in the collection, Scheele uses a variety of traditional verse forms as well as free verse and syllabics, carefully fitting the form of each poem to his subject matter.

Though most of the poems are set in Nebraska and neighboring states, there is a universality to the subjects Scheele addresses. In these poems anywhere is everywhere.

Roy Scheele

As an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska in the early and mid-1960s, Roy Scheele studied with Karl Shapiro and attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, where he met Robert Frost, John Ciardi, and John Frederick Nims. Scheele holds a B.A. in classical Greek and an M.A. in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and has taught classics at Nebraska and Creighton University and English at the University of Tennessee at Martin, a gymnasium in Germany, and Doane College in Crete, Nebraska, where he is currently associate professor of English and Poet-in-Residence. Scheele's poems, critical essays, and interviews and profiles have been widely published in such distinguished journals as Poetry, Poets & Writers, Prairie Schooner, The New England Review, The Southern Review, and numerous university and little magazines. His poems have been frequently anthologized, most notably in Strong Measures (Harper & Row, 1986), and his interviews with Hayden Carruth, Miroslav Holub, and W. D. Snodgrass have been reprinted in The Verse Book of Interviews and elsewhere. Scheele's first book-length collection of poems, Pointing Out the Sky (Sandhills Press, 1985), was a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America, and he has won several first-place awards in the World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets international poetry competitions. In 1993 he received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council.

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