Böcker av Ahrend Torrey

"The Jane Kenyon Erasure Poems by Ahrend Torrey invites us into a world of pondering about the creative process. Of juxtaposition and balance. ... We find ourselves in a story of humid primal earth and man. A story of choice of perception. In the second section of the book (the text isolated from the erasure images), we read this story in its new incarnation and experience the meditations on mind, sexuality, flowers and sky, darkness and uncertainty. These poems ask us to question the curtains that we took as certainties. Days and nights. Words and no-words. Guided by scents and an almost spiritual companion of a dog throughout, Ahrend Torrey once again brings us the light and the dark, the dis-ease and the hope. Drawing his respect for Jane Kenyon's work into his and our imaginations: dark red veins rich with memory and forgetting."-Susan Entsminger, from The Sources and Courses of Images, Words, and Ideas

Ripples invites an awakening-"the sun lifting itself, over the fence, and the tree." As we read, "a ripple wave appears ... a pine nut falls into the dark, still pond ..." Dying monarchs, oily waters of the Mississippi, emaciated polar bears-the mindless rush of life is transformed through a meditation of the moment. Mindful observations allow us to see through our fears. Ask the delicate holy basil leaves why we live; watch it grow; steep tulsi; and hear "There's not just you, there's us."Shock waves of the pandemic threaten to kill our abilities to feel and see: shameful social injustices alongside connections. "Look at those two rivers ... Kneel on your knees in the boat. Lean over the edge at the very touching of the two-where the seagulls shimmer off the water-where sun glimmers. ... What do you see now, cupped in your palms? Not the dense brown, like first you saw, not the green-blue, but another color, another color."Poems that help us acknowledge the disease of fear and hatred. How do we think about race, gender, and sexual orientation? "Is our mind, our environment, / and our environment, our mind?" Who are we as a culture of individuals? Self and Other start to bleed into each other. "We paint on our face" to try to function in a society that suffocates diversity, individuality, creativity. While "one thing you can't control / is your heart."

In the stillness of the heart in flight, we find poems colored with mindful observations: birds, humanity, relationship. Set in the lagoons, rivers, neighborhoods, gardens, cafés, marshlands, and highways of southern Louisiana."Where might we be, or not be, without them?" ("Near the Mississippi ..."). Poems inhabited with hummingbird, swan, egret, stork, crow, duck, mother bird's beak-of-seeds, starlings, chickens, sanderlings, blue jay, heron, house sparrow, hawk and robin, white ibis."like soft rain, / to wake you, to console / your pounding heart, / ... / Listen, / he said, / become these crickets." ("I Asked a Tibetan Monk ..."). Gratitude to replace annoyance, gratitude for what didn't happen, gratitude for knowing how it feels to be loved, for the never uttered before moment. Time burning, and drifting into the ephemeral. "silence and wind dance together / a solemn dance" ("Trying to Save Her ...").Beauty in knowing and not knowing. Sensitivity to sound and rhythm, daring in forms, Bird City, American Eye offers a place for quiet reflection and heartfelt action, a place where "another still and untouched thing / feels love." ("I Throw Rocks ...").