Poems Books

Through Judith's verse and drawings, she is able to take you to another universe. She takes you to a higher plane of contemplation and awareness most do not find within themselves. Reading her poetry gives one a stepping stone for self exploration. Her drawings are something one could only imagine in dreams.Excellent book, I am looking forward to reading her new book Mortification Stew.

"Angels All About" by Judith Gayle Sherrouse is a deeply thought provoking yet enjoyable book to read. The drawings, while tending towards too much nudity, are tastefully moderated and show an uncommon natural artistic flair. The poems accompanying the illustrations are bizarre enough to cause the reader to reflect on their inner self. While at first appearing to have little meaning, upon contemplation they seem to reach into your soul. I would recommend this book to any and all that feel they are searching or are lacking in something.

Through Judith's verse and drawings, she is able to take you to another universe. She takes you to a higher plane of contemplation and awareness most do not find within themselves. Reading her poetry gives one a stepping stone for self exploration. Her drawings are something one could only imagine in dreams.Excellent book, I am looking forward to reading her new book Mortification Stew.

Luci Shaw's poetry speaks straight into one's soul. She takes ideas and lights them up with unforgetable images. She is an artist who knows herself and her God and communicates her heart in the beautiful words she uses. I can think of nothing more enjoyable than curling up on a couch or relaxing at the beach with her poems in my hand. Thankyou Luci for enriching my life! (It began with "Listen to the Green" in the 70's - more please!)

So much of the Christian poetry I've read is doggerel, usually dripping with sentimentality and cliche. So much modern poetry is so narrowly within the author's own head that you can scarcely connect with the images. Shaw, on the other hand, is what the average pedestrian really yearns for in a poet. Her poetry is always accessible, yet fresh with new ways of saying things. She helps you see the world. Her images sparkle and dance in your mind. Here's an example: "What word informs the world, / and moves the worm along in his blind tunnel? / What secret purple wisdom tells the iris edges / to unfurl in frills? What juiced and emerald thrill / urges the sap until the bud resolves / its tight riddle? . . . What silver sound / thaws winter into spring? Speaks clamor into singing? / Gives love for loneliness? It is this / unterrestrial pulse, deep as heaven, that folds you / in its tingling embrace, gongs in your echo heart."

We are here to abet creation and to witness it, to notice each thing, so each thing gets noticed. . . so that Creation need not play to an empty
house.
-Annie Dillard

The key scene in M. Night Shyamalan's film Signs comes when Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) and his brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) are discussing the
implications of what seems to be an alien visitation, signaled by a number of lights that have appeared over Mexico City:

People --- break down into two groups. When they experience something lucky, group number one sees it as more than luck or a
coincidence. They see it as a sign, evidence that there is Someone out there watching out for them. Group number two sees it as just pure luck, a
happy turn of chance. Well sure there are people in group number two are looking at those 14 lights in a very suspicious way. For them, the
situation isn't fifty/ fifty could be bad, could be good , but deep down they feel that whatever happens, they are on their own, and that fills them
with fear.

Yeah, there are those people, but there's a whole lot of people in group number one. When they see those fourteen lights they are looking at a
miracle. And deep down they feel that whatever is going to happen, there will be Someone there to help them, and that fills them with hope.

So what you have to ask yourself is what kind of person are you? Are you the kind that sees signs, sees miracles, or do you believe that people
just get lucky? Or look at the question this way --- is it possible that there are no coincidences?

Luci Shaw's poetry is based on the thrill of finding those signs in the everyday, of having faith that it is God who has placed them there and hope because of that.

A few examples will serve to give the flavor of the batch and speak far more eloquently than can I:

We know this to start with:

If we understood everything we wouldn't
be baffled. But mystery lives; somehow
without witchcraft or chicanery

we collect sounds and colors in a skyward
dish, like fruit in a bowl, and channel them
into verisimilitude--faces talking at us

from the tube's glass eye. Hallways of fog
enfold us in enigma. And then, the marvel of
window glass--how can anything be

hard enough to stop the hand and
hold its smudge while letting through this
soft light? The one wheat kernel that

breeds a thousand--a miracle of
loaves over and over again.
The stars, invisible in the blind day

revealed, thick as pollen, by the absence
of light. A billion spiky grass blades that melt
into a perfectly flat horizon. The Holy Ghost

waking me in my bedroom, drenching my
dry heart with fluid syllables, breathing
flesh into the fetal bones of this poem.

Rising: The underground tree
(Cornus sanguinea and cornus canadensis)

One spring in Tennessee I walked a tunnel
under dogwood trees, noting the petals
(in fours like crosses) and at each tender apex
four russet stains dark at Christ-wounds.
I knew that with the year the dogwood flower heads
would ripen into berry clusters bright as drops of gore.

Last week, a double-click on Botany
startled me with the kinship of those trees and bunch-berries, whose densely crowded mat
carpets the deep woods around my valley cabin.
Only their flowers--those white quartets of petals--
suggest the blood relationship. Since then I see

the miniature leaves and buds as tips of trees
burgeoning underground, knotted roots like limbs
pushing up to light through rock and humus.
The pure cross-flowers at my feet redeem
their long, dark burial in the ground, show how even
a weight of stony soil cannot keep Easter at bay.

Bubble

I watch it being blown, swelling and rising
from my grandson's red plastic ring, fresh-filled
with eager air, tenuous as just-spilled
dandelion silk, a fluid wobble, quite surprising

me with its likeness to our cosmic bubble,
all greens and blues, each continent and sea
etched in bright enamel by God and gravity--
a film's fine iridescence fixed. The trouble

is: before the shivering, frail balloon has hovered
long it bursts in a star of spray that pricks my skin
with cool fireworks, so that, in vanishing, it winks
at my comparison just as the simile is offered.

But mind's a watercolor paper. This visual spasm
has brushed me with its indelible, swift
rainbow strokes of form and gleam. My visions shift
between the micro- and the macrocosm,

ephemeral both, as radiant as grace,
glass globules in the furnace air, both sealed
off after a creative breath, and then annealed,
floating their minor vessels into space.

Reading these poems awakens us to the wonder of the world around us and, if we've a mind to allow it, transforms the mundane into the miraculous. You can't help but observe your surroundings
more closely and ponder existence more fiercely. And it's certainly possible that you'll choose to be the kind of person who views it all as lucky chance and insists we're alone and nothing means
anything. But, there's also a possibility that you too will see signs and miracles and be infused with hope. Ms Shaw enhances the latter possibility. Her poems, in that sense, are an extraordinary gift to
the reader.

During the years I lived in Portland, Oregon, William Stafford was an inspiring friend who gave me advice at times when I asked for it and was an inspiration for my own writing.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves poetry.
Wanda Weiskopf
Author of two collections of poetry and the memoir, "On the Wings of Song, My Life with the Maestro."

Excellent compilation of Stafford's poems. One of modern times greatest poets. Well worth the read.

Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford 1937-1947 is an anthology of vintage free-verse poetry by teacher, award-winning author, and poet William Stafford. The poems have been chosen from Stafford's earlier works by poet, teacher, and former Marine officer (one of the first to be honorably discharged as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War) Fred Marchant. Many of the poems date back to the World War II era; Stafford was a conscientious objector during this time, assigned under penalty of law to work in Civilian Public Service camps, a type of internal exile within his own country. Nearly all the poems in Another World Instead have never before been published - now their tale of a committed pacifist and fledgling poet living in a time of war can be told. Highly recommended. "Fate": More steadfast than a truck / Along a narrow street / A minute looks for you / Until you meet.

"Antler: The Selected Poems" is a hearty helping of the work of this remarkable poet. The book contains an introduction by Jeff Poniewaz, who discusses Antler's literary career and his relationship with another great poet, Allen Ginsberg.

Antler's work is humane, shamanic, erotic (both homo- and hetero-), earthy, satiric, horrific, mystical, and playful. It's also often quite funny--I chuckled in delight a number of times while reading the book. Antler invokes a number of poets in his own work: Neruda, Lorca, Plath, Keats, etc. But the name most often raised is that of Walt Whitman. In the acknowledgements section of the book Antler claims Whitman as his "spiritual father," and indeed in these poems I see Antler carrying forward a poetic/prophetic torch he inherited from Whitman.

Antler writes in a direct, clear, muscular style that is ripe with the smells of life. He sometimes plays with words in a way which reminds me of E.E. Cummings. He is, to use his own words, "the scholar of winks and the archeologist of guffaws"--a composer of "visionary sexpoems/ and marijuana hymns." Like Whitman, his vision embraces "every Livingkind." In a number of poems he explores and defends poetry itself, and ponders the role of the poet in our world.

Antler is a poet of the natural world--a defender of the earth, and he also writes with compassion for the downtrodden workers in the world of human industry. He finds revelations in plants, animals, terrain, and in his fellow human beings. Antler's is a remarkable voice--full of love, outrage, and sexual energy, and this book is rich, powerful, and rewarding poetic testament.

Antler is a great poet, one more people ought to know about. He is the closest thing to Whitman--our greatest poet--I have ever come across in vitality, humor, empathy, sheer humanity. His is a distinctive voice. This collection is a little uneven, but you'd better get it before it goes out of print. Thanks to Soft Skull Press for bringing the material into print.

Antler's work is singular and amazing. Whitmanesque? Sure. Ginsbergian? Yeah. Antlerian? You betcha! We need that term created for Antler's work. If you love poetry and have never heard of Antler, blame the horrible state of contemporary poetry, publishing and lit programs. Antler's work is mindblowingly beautiful and inspired by a love of man, earth, creation and more sources for loveliness than you have ever considered possible. Reading Antler's work is a revelation of never before considered levels of beauty. This world and life is worthy of praise and love and ecstasy, and Antler's work reminds us all...and *this* is why he's mentioned in the same breath with Whitman. But don't take my word for it. Read the controversy of poetry blissed out on love of all that is has been and will be. Read and revel in the power of his wonderful funny, erotic, blessed verse.

Who does poetry like this anymore? Who dares to call themselves a visionary or writes like one?

Find it, read it, it is singular.

Perfect

I read the first parts years ago and always wondered where it would go, and it's so awesome to see it one piece. This is a true gem of modern literature.

Ronald Johnson, who died in March of 1998, worked over twenty years on his epic-length cosmological poem ARK. It was worth the wait--for those who love long poems like Pound's Cantos, Williams's Paterson, Olson's Maximus, or Zukofsky's "A", ARK will take a place among these great monuments. For those whose tastes run to more traditional works like Merrill's Changing Light at Sandover, ARK will delight and astonish through its ongoing exploration of science, spirituality, and the poetic quest. I've been reading this poem in bits and pieces for fifteen years now, and I am delighted finally to see it collected in a single volume.

"What is poetry?" is a question often asked and never answered, indeed unanswerable except in a personal context. I tend toward the "elevated speech" school, or "gorgeous language" persuasion, but language focussed on expressing deeply felt and perceived truth. So I find Myrna Stone's poems immensely satisfying.

Open her book at random, as I just have. "Penitential" says that on Saturday evening we went to church, perhaps for confession, perhaps for "devotions." Our religion impressed us with our guilt and need for penance. Still, walking home, we experienced the world as it was and knew that we would continue to need forgiveness. But this poem tells this ordinary tale in rich, magnificent language,

"...light has gathered,
luminous for a moment in its passage
into night, in its clear and familiar

sense of diminishing grace,
what the priests for years allowed us
from one summer Saturday to the next,
so that while feeding the dog or setting

the table, we might well look
up to find the kingdom of God suddenly
come, and ourselves, in our sparest
and smallest duties, surely wanting."

I don't think you have to be (or have been) Catholic to appreciate this poem.

There is variety in these poems, and wit, not always benign, for example, "Your Last Mistress" that begins
"Is older than I thought" and ends, after explaining that she has found a new lover,
"...She's back again
in the groove, in the saddle, back again
back on her back."

There are poems here that relate travel experiences, family difficulties and pleasures (sometimes experienced while travelling), and the pain of loss of parent - all with a very grown-up sensibility and mastery of expression to die for, or rather, to be most grateful for. To my mind and ear, these poems are a treasure.

In 'The Art of Loss' Myrna Stone starts with an ele-
giac poem to a poetry friend and ends with an elegiac poem to
her mother. Stone is doing tough and necessary work, namely:
Since we all lose in the end, how can we talk about being tri-
umphant? But in her mature, brilliant poems Myrna Stone does
triumph and bucks all of us up in the process-- with gems like
"Waiting for Daddy", "The Lost Boy", "Your Last Mistress", and
"Home Movies", to name just a few. And her poems dealing with
Van Gogh and Degas are superb ( "The Tub" is flat out aces.)
Stephen Dunn says that in Myrna Stone's poems "we
see pathos rise to the level of the sublime"-- a statement
that got me thinking of Charlie Chaplin, how he would have
loved these poems! Lucky for us, we can savor them:

And if you begin to speak to me
of what desire is like on the opposing
plane, of what extreme punishments
or pleasures await even the least of us

I would dissuade you,
I would kiss your cheek and lead you here
to this room, to this chair, this desk
and this window's suddenly luminescent view.
WORDS FOR MY MOTHER

'The Art of Loss'is one book we should keep close by as we
go through this crazy world.

Here is a poet who loves the language. Each word of each poem is finely tuned. I have followed her poems for years. Read The Art of Loss and you will not be disappointed. Her language sings and soothes. Simulacrum, From the Kitchen, My Mother's Room, Taraxacum Officinale and Words for My Mother, are just a few of my favorites. This book is a keeper!

I attended Prestonsburg Community College and took English and Appalachian Studies classes under Mr. Slone. During these classes Mr. Slone occasionally brought his work into class for our review. It took my breath then and it takes it now. I am so proud to be from Eastern Kentucky but more importantly that I know and was able to learn from Ken Slone.

Wonderful! Even if you never grew up in Eastern Kentucky as I did, you'll feel as if you had. Great poetry. Also, the artwork of Tom Whitaker is great also. A must have for every bookshelf.

His book of poems captivated me and kept me wanting to read more about the mountains and mountain life. I did not grow up in the mountains and after reading many of his poems I came to understand the closeness of family life in the mountains. I felt that when I read certain poems, that I was right there and could see, hear and feel the nature of the hills. Excellent!!!

Experienced poet David Yezzi returns with his third anthology of poetry in "Azores". Well-written throughout, touching on the humor and somberness found in everyday life with an intellectual tint, "Azores" is an ideal pick for poetry fans and community library collections. "Tritina for Susannah": The water off these rocks is green and cold./ The sandless coast takes the tide in its mouth,/ as a wolf brings down a deer or lifts its child.// I walked this bay before you were my child./ Your fingers stinging brightly in the cold,/ I take each one and warm it in my mouth.//Though I've known this shore for years, my mouth/ holds no charms of use to you, my child./ You will have to learn the words to ward off cold// and know them cold, child, in your open mouth.

Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R25IVPFP2X4NBM Bernard Chapin saying hi. I really enjoyed this collection and love Yezzi's work overall.

Adam Kirsch already said it best: "The sophistication of Mr. Yezzi's language perfectly suits the sophistication of his understanding, and some of the poems in 'Azores'--'Very Like a Whale,' 'Dog's Life,' the brilliant and unexpected dramatic monologue 'The Ghost-Seer--display a mastery reminiscent of Philip Larkin and Donald Justice, which no poet of Mr. Yezzi's generation can match." 'Nuff said!

Snyder has lived in the Sierra Nevada foothills since 1970. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1975 for "Turtle Island," he has twice been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, in 1992 and 2005. He is a recipient of the Bollingen Poetry Prize, the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award and the 2004 Japanese Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Grand Prize.

His latest book, "Back on the Fire" ($24 in hardcover from Shoemaker and Hoard), features recent essays, most previously published, that intermingle autobiography, reflections on the place of the writer in the modern world and a concern that those who have benefited from the natural world (all of us) become more thankful and "give something back."

Snyder sees the world through Daoist-Confucian-Mahayana Buddhist eyes and has little patience for those who romanticize nature with their "quasi-religious pantheistic landscape enthusiasms." In Snyder's "literature of the environment," "we will necessarily be exploring the dark side of nature -- nocturnal, parasitic energies of decomposition and their human parallels." He adds, in another essay: "Nature is not fuzzy and warm. Nature is vulnerable, but it is also tough, and it will inevitably be last up at bat."

Many of the essays deal with the forest, and fire, as a kind of symbol of changing public policy toward the wilderness. "Our wild forests have long had an elegant and self-sustaining nutrient and energy cycle, and staying within that should be a key measure of true sustainability." Periodic low-level fires are necessary for keeping the forest healthy; logging practices that remove the surviving trees after a major fire make it more difficult for the forest to sustain itself. Just as governments have to think in terms of thousands of years in dealing with nuclear waste, Snyder writes, we ought to be thinking of a "thousand year forest plan" as well. Ecology is about process, "a creation happening constantly in each moment. A close term in East Asian philosophy is the word Dao, the Way, dô in Japanese." As he writes in a poem, "--Nature not a book, but a performance, a / high old culture."

The art Snyder advocates "takes nothing from the world; it is a gift and an exchange. It leave the world nourished." "We study the great writings of the Asian past," he writes, "so that we might surpass them today. We hope to create a deeply grounded contemporary literature of nature that celebrates the wonder of our natural world, that draws on and makes beauty of the incredibly rich knowledge gained from science, and that confronts the terrible damage being done today in the name of progress and the world economy."

One November day, Snyder has cleared brush from around his house and sets fire to the pile. "Clouds darkening up from the West, a breeze, a Pacific storm headed this way. Let the flames finish their work -- a few more limb-ends and stubs around the edge to clean up, a few more dumb thoughts and failed ideas to discard -- I think -- this has gone on for many lives!

"How many times / have I thrown you / back on the fire."

Copyright 2007 Chico Enterprise-Record. Used by permission.

Gary Snyder is able to capture in simple words and clear imagery the essence of many of the conditions found in his adopted home in northern California. He recognises problems and poses solutions that are not only reasonable, but possible. This book should be read by anyone concerned with the present state of affairs as regards both the local and the national environment.

These essays, including those written as talks or prefaces to other people's books, are in no sense minor. They are often distillations--not so much argument as succinct statements of profound if still largely unacknowledged truths, simply and generously interwoven with history, anecdote, example, biography and autobiography.

Though there may appear to be no unifying theme, and though the specific subject of the role of fire in healthy forests recurs, this volume is a whole defined by itself, and by the quality of Snyder's observation, thought and expression. For me, the connection between his immersion in East Asian writing, in Buddhism, in the realities of living and working in the natural world, in American literature (Native and non-Native), and his own writing and approach to the world, has never been clearer. That impression is nourished by reading together such essays as "Ecology, Literature and the New World Disorder," "Thinking Toward the Thousand Year Forest Plan," "The Mountain Spirit's True (No) Nature," "Writers and the War Against Nature," "Coyote Makes Things Hard."

Some pieces are short and specific, and thanks to Snyder's writing, evocative, including a short piece on the death of one of the best known of his fellow poets who began in the "Beat" era, Allen Ginsberg, and a fond and informative remembrances of one of the least known, Philip Zenshin Whalen. But even these are important because of Snyder's knowledge of them and perspective over time. Others about particular people and places (especially about Snyder's own family, as in "Helen Callicotte's Stone in Kansas") are also fun to read, but always connect to larger mysteries.

In these essays Snyder writes with warmth as well as pith, and with occasional bursts of exuberant humor. He writes with specific humility, yet is not afraid to state the largest possible conclusions: "These environmental histories are cautionary. They tell us that our land planning must extend ahead more than a few decades. Even a few centuries may be insufficient."

For me, there is another key to these essays in this observation: "Song, story and dance are fundamental to all later `civilized' culture," Snyder writes. "Performance is of key importance because this phenomenal world and all life is, of itself, not a book but a performance."

So these essays can be read as performances, expressing knowledge and experience from a specific, highly varied yet integrated life. This is a book of an Elder, in the old sense. I read it with admiration and gratitude.

The first, perhaps the only, test of a good book is--does it keep me turning the pages? This little book passes the test easily. It is so readable, so accessible.

The author has written about various episodes in his life, from childhood into adulthood, some as poetry, others as prose. All of it rings so true because of the settings, the situations and the words--real people living real lives.

Whether writing lovingly about his mother, or ruefully recounting how he'd been taken in by a con man, Mark Scheel pulled me into his stories and made me care about his people. I loved this book.

...The stories and poems in the book are largely autobiographical, in so far as they follow a life much like the author's, and there are some very good things here. What there is not is a unified style. Scheel likes to play around with words and ideas and styles, and A BACKWARD VIEW has a little bit of everything, from the straightforward childhood memory of "The Old Buggy" to the strange, Joycean "Ulysses at a Kansas University."

Although Scheel seems to prefer his stories, his poems have their own strengths. We cannot lose the image from "Rain" of the little boy riding on his father's shoulders, "Cocky as a squirrel."

This is a book worth having.

Author Mark Scheel offers up slices of his life and times for our pleasure and consideration in his award-winning A BACKWARD VIEW. From sweet to bitter and then back to sweet, this collection of short stories, poems, thoughts and recollections drops refreshing moments into our otherwise crowded hours.

Scheel's family becomes ours in his humorous and playful recollections of the demise of "The Old Buggy." Granddad's calm smile, as Mother uses all her persuasive powers to convince him there is still value in the old family buggy, hints at the very beginning that the buggy is doomed. Throughout, Scheel's dialogue and word pictures make his memories part of our past.

The poetry tucked here and there is alive with sensation--touch, taste, smell and sound all take form as you spend time under Dad's oil-skinned slicker in the rain ("Rain") or sniff glue and take pills to jangle your "insight" awake ("The Bad Ole Days"). Scheel points out the bitter-sweet truth that what was strange or bizarre or obscene "back then" is commonplace and happening next door now.

Scheel gives us a glimpse of the sentimental in expressing the excitement and challenges of lifestyle changes; along with a wisp of regret. "But--every now and then an auburn hair (they come from the dust, I think, under the bed) gets me tangled in the way you used to smile."

As Scheel shares these moments in time the reader comes to understand that dreams and accomplishments are the fuel of life and that non-acomplishments are not really failures, but just a part of the backdrop of our lives.

As he looks back over the fabric of his life, Scheel asks an unrepentant Time, "When did you fray the fringes off my carpet?"

This book is "a keeper"--keep it on the night stand or coffee table--slice off a poem to enjoy before bed, a short story to help ease the day's pressures or a little of both for no good reason except to enjoy reverie created by Scheel's words.