In this book Jerry Neal has collected many of his best known and most popular poems written over 45 years for a general audience, as well as many poems that are not as well known but remain important to understanding his development as a poet as well as his poetic outlook and the world issues he was concerned with. Jerry Neal was born in 1952 in Monticello, Kentucky. He grew up in Wellington in central Illinois and began to write during the counter-culture explosion of the 1960s. He was heavily influenced by the early high modernist poetry and literature of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, James Joyce, Marianne Moore, and Robinson Jeffers, as well as that of their models and precedessors among the French Symbolist poets: Charles Baudelaire, Stephané Mallarmé, and Arthur Rimbaud; and the medieval and classical authors: Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Vergil, and Ovid. He continued to study ancient classics of all kinds, whether Hindu, Bhuddhist, or Moslem, often in the original languages. In the mid 1970s Neal converted to a non-traditional form of Christianity and became influenced by Ancient Near Eastern literature and Ancient Near Eastern languages, especially the Semitic languages such as Hebrew, Aramaic, Akkadian, and Ugaritic, and the literature of Canaanite Ugarit, and the Sumerians and the Babylonians in ancient Iraq. He also studied non-canonical Jewish literature such as the books of Enoch and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Mr. Neal has continued to speak out against world injustice, whether it be the American invasion of Iraq, the horrors of Gadaffi's reign of terror, or the war in Syria. He has continued to refuse to support political and religious agendas of any kind. His poetry is often considered iconoclastic. Selected Poems is Mr. Neal's ninth book. His other books include several books and anthologies of poetry, as well as the history book The Jewish Origins of Christianity and the Separation of the Church and Synagogue, and the book of Ancient Near Eastern studies, The Ugaritic Texts and the Bible. Jerry Neal attended Danville Area Community College in Danville, Illinois, and graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature; he earned a Master's of Theological Studies at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary. He has been involved in poetry events in Grand Rapids Michigan since 1993.
