From prince to prisoner, Li Yu (937-978) ruled briefly over his family's Southern Tang kingdom before he was taken prisoner by the powerful and warlike Northern Song dynasty. This vivid arc, from rule to ruin, is reflected in his poetry. Ineffectual as a ruler, he loved and celebrated court life, with its parties, dancing, drinking, and trysts. Later, having lost his kingdom, he came to know sorrow, homesickness, and the need to reconcile his melancholy with the passage of seasons and the fragility of life.
"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."
"Poems which open with the hand-in-hand nature of grief and gratitude. Tolf's eyes make Beauty that helps us believe in something. Scenes to put our hearts into. Pain, love, beauty, injustices, hurt, control. Compassion for animals and strength from nature. A community of gratitude to help heal and experience a whole life"--
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 ...").
In Sundown at Faith Regional, Barbara Schmitz offers Heart Medicine which "drops the pain body"-an invitation to let go to the rhythms of her love songs to life. Death and childhood; memory and forgetting; family cacophonies and inventions of relationships. Detachment and acceptance, like 'the indifference cloak, ' creates a liberating energy. "The wings to the heart the Sufis say / are independence / and indifference, ' and the sense of humor at our failings becomes the success. Laced with "beauty, the lyrical pain," we drink an elixir of laughter and tears."Barbara Schmitz explores the necessary question of how to live fully even as one faces one's own mortality. The poems are clear-eyed, unflinching, accepting of loss and grief, acknowledging suffering, yet often witty and filled with a quiet sense of wonder as she observes the world around her and ponders the connections we humans make with our surroundings and each other. She knows that 'It hurts this dissolving / Still it's where we hope to go.' Her poems never lose faith as they sing us on our way."-Grace Bauer, author of Unholy Heart: New & Selected Poems"Sundown at Faith Regional is like a look at a lifetime in a moment's flash. Barbara Schmitz works with heavy themes of aging and illness using a gentle touch that shows a comforting joy. It's this kind of playing with our expectations that adds to the power, with poems like 'Meditation on Potato Salad' which has dimensions by being both funny as well as a serious meditation on meditation. It's a book full of surprises in both the pain and the joy of it, well worth the journey."-Matt Mason, author of I Have a Poem the Size of the Moon"'Give me inspiration' Schmitz asks 'one more noseful mouthful / eyes alight give me wonder' and the universe answers as it always does, with longings fulfilled and forgotten, with generous hours that whittle down toward their final goodbyes. While both faith and fear linger here, Sundown at Faith Regional bends the needle toward hope, 'not lying exactly / but stretching the truth / with our arms so / it fits over our shoulders.'"-Todd Robinson, author of Mass for Shut-Ins
"Daring modern poetry: The first section provides humorous relief: everyday radical scenes to experience and awaken. From that, a sense of independence and empowerment grows. Like in 'Autostereogram,' 'letting our monkish minds / imagine ... // you see whatever you want to see, whatever / you're bound to see' with a great finale of looking out at the sea or ... Inviting an active role in choosing how we choose to see and live. The frustration and sadness of the second section is buoyed by the sustaining reel of creative imagery as well as tender touches. Strong as well as sensitive. The third section draws admiration for the gutsy and admirable craft of constructing the A-Z compositions without a skipping a beat in the storytelling talent. As in 'Email to a Young Poet,' the lines may be 'gross and dangerous' but 'you have to learn to cope with pain. / Noxious amounts of it'"
Poems and refrains punctuated along a moving sidewalk space-time mural of New York City: the good, ugly, tender, and hard. Rhythmic clamor and musical riffs embedded in the strokes and colors of the accompanying artwork. The engaging English translation complete with rhyme and alliteration, inherent and essential to the poems. With a downbeat of "Earthy sewer fumes" the dance begins, to lace together earth and sky, solid and vapor. Enter the metro of mysticisms, opening to tender human truths. Writers and musicians; dreams and imagination; memory and forgetting; a collective creative force harnesses survival."A beautiful book of nine poems by nine illustrations-in fact eighteen, the illustrations are diptychs, an exercise in variations, of what Leibniz calls identitas in varietate. To the formal fluctuation is added the chromatic, and the drift could be seasonal, I would say from spring to autumn. The tableaux is made of an odd number of pieces, with centrality and symmetries. Tableaux as a mnemonic locus, as a figure of the world."Valentí Gómez i Oliver is a great connoisseur of the history of thought and spirituality and is also very fond of the traditional arts of strategy and its iconographic tricks. An altarpiece "tableaux"-an interior façade in the form of a compartmentalized cove, where various figures are placed around the main one. The wise old fox Valentí has placed his pieces with devilish skill, and even with some foul mood. The inadvertent reader can be confused by the apparent heterogeneity of the elements, ranging from classical antiquity to the heroes of the pulp and today. As in a carnival, they parade through the text: Pound, Guggenheim, Crane, Lorca, Warhol, Madoff, Obama; but also Poe, Freud, Pavese, Gilgamesh. In this fascinating poetic text the characters are drawn from Hellenic and Christian orthodoxy, and also from art and thought in general, from the Gnostics, the Cabal, Esotericism, Freemasonry."-Miquel de Palol, excerpts from a review in the Catalan paper, El Punt, and from a presentation at Blanquerna, Catalan Cultural Center in Madrid"Because Saint George summons beauty and this is a book to give away. Because New York, sung by Walt Whitman and Federico García Lorca, has now been so in prodigious Catalan and with the tones and rhythms of the drawings of a poet to whom a black woman with hands shattered by life asked for the pen in the subway and after caressing her he returned to her with a God bless you, sir!, such a Madonna of the Tableaux of that city and of this astonishing and inexhaustible book."-Lluis Boada, economist and writer
Poems of family, stories, lives in progress, reflection, nature. From hummingbirds to herons, from Ireland to Boston, the stories and the poems revolve and evolve."I read Michael Miller's poems with great pleasure in their accurate seeing, their assured phrasing, their true and proportionate feeling."-Richard Wilbur
"In Ridges, Diane Moore creates a mystical space-a union of art, poetry, biography and nature-that honors her friend Don Thornton's life and his vivid paintings of Louisiana's Chenier Plain."-Rose Anne Raphael, Artist and Writer, New Iberia, Louisiana"Diane Moore's Ridges sings of friendship born from a mutual love of nature and a shared Louisiana landscape. Interspersed with Don Thornton's paintings, these poems resonate with a seasonal rhythm of birth and blossoming, death and decay. They remind us of the actual history of hurricanes in 1856 and 1893, giving us a Louisiana landscape always suffering from nature's threats and menaces. Moore deftly blends natural and human, art and place, in this loving tribute to a fellow artist and friend, seeing in those ridges 'the mud flats of old sufferings.' Bravo to a seasoned poet whose works speak to all that makes us human."-Mary Ann Wilson, Professor Emerita of English, University of Louisiana, Lafayette"Diane Moore's empathetic poems expand readers' understandings of Thornton's paintings of the Chenier Plain. Her vivid words illustrate how live oak ridges' 'submerged and revived' water levels affect plant and animal life as they adapt to this unique ecology."-Kathleen Hamman, Editor & Publisher, Creative Services, Sewanee, Tennessee"A haunting collection of poems and paintings. Diane Moore crowns her work, so far, with this splendid merger of paintings, Don Thornton's life, nature, and her own deep empathy."-Jo Ann Lordahl, Author of My Unveiled Face: A Memoir of a Free Woman and Princess Ruth: Love & Tragedy in Hawai'i
"Yin Xiaoyuan holds back nothing. Their poems are bulky, cinematic, suddenly despondent, pulling back and the poem ends. I applaud the richness of the work, its bravery, its quirkiness. I turn the pages for another vista and another reshuffling of what a poem is. I feel like a fledgling lover, abandoned, happy and surprised."-Eileen Myles
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