Ben Greer

Ben Greer was born in Spartanburg, South Carolina, on December 4, 1948. He was raised in the magical hamlet of Glenn Springs. He graduated from the University of South Carolina and Hollins University. He published his first novel, Slammer, at twenty-six to rave reviews and went on to publish four others. His first book of poetry was published at fifty-nine. Ben has also written three plays, including Little Tin Gods, produced by Theatre South in 2008. Having taught at the University of South Carolina for thirty-three years, he is retired and divides his time between South Carolina and Maine.

Praise for The Naked Prince and Ben Greer

In Ben Greer’s new collection, The Naked Prince: New and Selected Poems, James Dickey is a haunting presence whose shadow grows thin with Greer’s restraint, and a strange kind of self-awareness that offers a redemptive elegiac dialogue with Dickey. “Deception was your truth,” he says in “James Dickey’s Lot,” and in this, Greer, without fanfare or alarm, becomes his own poet. We are given a splendid introduction to Greer’s pared down lyric sense, poems deceptively accessible even as they consider profound moments with vulnerability and humility. Greer’s poetry reveals the broken and troubled history of the making of a man who has lived through an America in deep turmoil. In the end, poetry is his language of prayer and hope, a comfort. In “Ease” he writes, “I’m getting old, not long to live. / I hold my life above a sieve.” Poetry is his sieve, as much as God is his sieve. It is a beautiful epigraphical moment for a poet of elegance and deep sensitivity.

—Kwame Dawes, author of NEBRASKA

Ben Greer’s poems display an omnivorous approach to subject matter, and superb deftness with a variety of forms, from Italian sonnets to projective verse, and in between, memorable sestets, poems in haiku stanzas, and durably made free verse. The tones range from elegy to joyful love, stopping at brilliantly re-created brief moments arising from a bright alertness to the vagaries of this world. The Naked Prince is a fine collection, to reread and to keep. 

—Henry Taylor, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of This Tilted World Is Where I Live: New and Selected Poems, 1962–2020

The best of these poems—and there are many—are scenes of inner struggle, uncompromising arguments with the self, conducted with heart and wit.

—Billy Collins, Former U. S. Poet Laureate

[Greer’s] poems burn like fireflies in the night.

—Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prize winner

What a pleasure it is to open a book and find a live necessity in the words. And in such a book, what force there can be in a simple line like “laughing down the hollow stairs.”

—Richard Wilbur, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize