Pilate Suite, by Lance Le Grys

Poetry, chapbook, 44 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

By turns satiric, elegiac, and willfully grandiloquent (or all at once), Pilate Suite engages the ambiguous figure of Pontius Pilate in a series of phantasmagoric visions loosely arranged as a suite of variations on a theme.

Widely divergent in tone and narrative detail, employing a wide range of verse forms, from a rambling free verse to strict rhyming quatrains, the poems observe the imperial official writing poetry, drinking and lusting at a jazz-age soiree, struggling to achieve philosophic serenity amidst what he considers his barbaric surroundings, interviewing a hanged man, and interrogated by the Greek god Silenus, who arrives intrigued by reports of an unruly god who claims his blood is wine.

Lance Le Grys was born in 1970 in Cambridge, New York.  He received his B.A. in Classics from Middlebury College in 1992 and has made his living first as a Latin teacher and then as a librarian while furtively engaged in the dubious pursuit of writing poems. He currently lives in Vermont.  His work has appeared in many publications, including America, Caveat Lector, The Naugatuck River Review, The Lullwater Review, The West Trade Review, Knock, and The Southern Humanities Review.  His poetry collection, Views from an Outbuilding, is available from Clare Songbirds Publishing House. A selection of his songwriting indiscretions can be heard at legrys.bandcamp.com.