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Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness

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Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, eds. Phyllis Cole-Dai, Ruby R. Wilson, Grayson Books, West Hartford, CT, 2017, 250 pages, $21.95, paper, www.GraysonBooks.com.

I am hard at work (or joyfully at work) on my spring class with the Creative Retirement Institute (CRI), “Good Poetry for Hard Times,” and I am also working on several reviews for Jacar Press. As a result, I’ve decided that one way to manage my time is to pull back a little from the blog reviews. A little!

This morning I remembered this wonderful book, Poetry of Presence, gifted to me several years ago by my dear friend Holly J. Hughes. I pulled it down from the shelf and spent an hour browsing through its already well-thumbed pages.

So much to love! This is the dedication:

to the poets who help us be mindful in a world that has urgent need of presence

Out of the 153 poems, it’s difficult to choose just one to share. Poems by poets I know well: Hafiz, Barbara Crooker, William Stafford, Pablo Neruda, Wislawa Symborska, Laura Grace Weldon, Lucille Clifton, John O’Donohue. Perhaps you know this one:

Fluent

I would love to live
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding.

—John O’Donohue (p. 82)

And poets new to me (so many!), including Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Ghalib, Stuart Kestenbaum, Penny Harter, Fady Joudah. This book truly is a gift. (I am assembling a reading packet of poems for my class, and wondering why the heck I didn’t simply assign this book.) This morning, this poem especially caught my attention. (The lines in parentheses should be indented 5 spaces, but in the preview I see that the formatting gets lost.)

Think of Others

As you prepare your breakfast, think of others
(do not forget the pigeon’s food).
As you conduct your wars, think of others
(do not forget those who seek peace).
As you pay your water bill, think of others
(those who are nursed by clouds).
As you return home, to your home, think of others
(do not forget the people of the camps).
As you sleep and count the stars, think of others
(those who have nowhere to sleep).
As you express yourself in metaphor, think of others
(those who have lost the right to speak).
As you think of others far away, think of yourself
(say: If only I were a candle in the dark).

—Mahmoud Darwish [trans. by Mohammed Shaheen] (p. 142)

After a brilliant weekend of spring weather (capris! sandals!), this morning rain is falling, but sunlight is breaking through to light up the cherry tree, its blooms wetly drifting down. My dog, Pabu, is asleep in front of my cabin door, his nose pointed toward the heater. And I am so happy to be able to recommend this book to you.

But! Before I let you go, forgive a little shameless hustling (again) for my CRI course:

As I mention above, it is titled “Good Poetry for Hard Times,” and begins on Friday, May 24, running through June 14. It is not a writing class, but will (one hopes) inspire much writing. It is inexpensive, and I’d love to have you join me. (You don’t have to be retired.) For more information, check my home page for events, or click on this link: Spring Quarter CRI.

I’ll leave you with these end-lines of one more poem from Poetry of Presence: “as if this quiet day / with its tentative light weren’t enough, / as if joy weren’t strewn all around” (Holly J. Hughes, “Mind Wanting More,” p. 89).

Barbara Crooker, The Book of Kells

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THE BOOK OF KELLS, Barbara Crooker. The Poiema Poetry Series, Cascade Books, An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401, 2019, 88 pages, $12.00 paper, www.wipfandstock.com.

I’ve been saving this book for Easter Sunday. Barbara Crooker wrote these poems, her eighth full-length collection, in Ireland, while on a writing fellowship at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Co. Monaghan, Ireland. Her meditations on the Book of Kells, and other aspects of her sojourn, made me want to meditate on her poems. Like this one (note: the r and v refer to recto and verso, right and left, pages of the manuscript):

Interlinear

Let’s praise the agile little animals
that flit here and there in the Vulgate text,
who can wedge in small spaces: the moth
in initial P, antenna flickering outside the line.
Or the monk on his horse, trotting right off the page.
Look, there’s an otter, his mouth full of fish, and here,
a blue cat sits watchfully by. A gorgeous green lizard
slithers in the text, 72r, while a wolf pads his way
through 76v. It’s a whole barnyard: chickens and mice,
hounds and hares, snakes, eagles, and stags. Animals
as decoration. Animals as punctuation. Things seen
and unseen. So let us praise all of God’s creatures,
including the small and the inconsequential, all of us,
interlinear, part of the larger design.

—Barbara Crooker

This is a physically beautiful book, bought (again) on impulse, just because it was so lovely. But inside the covers, too, such beauty! “Somehow Barbara Crooker has fastened it all to the page here: the sweet green world of Ireland, with its glorious book of Kells, its age-old humor, its inimitable music, its poets with their delicious bendy language, so that you can almost taste those buttery scones and its peat-laced Irish whiskey” (Paul Mariani, back cover).

I wish I could buy copies for all of my friends. I wish I could write such a book. Part, as I said, meditation, part travelogue.  “For the monks, the very shape of the letters / were magical, this graceful insular majuscule” (“The Alphabet”). Then the poems drawing from Yeats and Heaney and other Irish poets. And the poems—more familiar to fans of Crooker—of domestic bliss: “drinking tea in a blue-patterned mug / while rain mutters and spatters / the flagstones” (“Almost”).

You will have to get your own copy, but here’s one more poem. It’s set in October (the month I visited Ireland in 2017), but makes a perfect poem for Easter.

Small Prayer

Ireland, late October, and first frost settles on the lawn.
Yesterday, the gardener on his tractor mowed
in concentric circles, a Celtic knot at the center
of his design. Now in the grooves, ice crystals
set off the pattern, illuminate it as surely
as monks in their cells. Up from the lake,
a fairy mist rises, and whooper swans bugle up
the dawn, which flushes the clouds pink and gold.
On this new day, may I walk out singing, open
to what’s never happened before. Let me be grateful.
Let me pay attention. And then when evening
closes the shutters, may I sail through the night
on the back of a swan.

—Barbara Crooker

This past Friday evening I attended a Zoom event with Enlighten Kitsap featuring Holly J. Hughes. It was a great introduction to inspirational poetry—and how we need poetry in hard times. She read a number of poems, including one by Barbara Crooker (and one by me!). I highly recommend it. The video should be posted in few days: http://www.enlightenkitsap.org/?page_id=13

And for today, may you “walk out singing, open / to what’s never happened before.”

https://www.tcd.ie/visitors/stunning-easter-symbolism-in-the-book-of-kells/

Lorna Goodison (b. 1947)

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Very likely it’s because I have a bad case of “want-to-escape-this-life-itis” (or maybe it’s just this news cycle), but lately, everywhere I look, I see poems about alternate lives.

One that keeps surfacing is a poem from Hold Fast, “Approaching 52,” in which Holly J. Hughes imagines a self realizing “she’ll never be a lion-tamer, tall hat and curling whip,” and it’s “too late for Jacques Cousteau,” or “a wildlife photographer….” Except in dreams — and in the poem.

Along this line of thought, I recently ordered a couple of books by the Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison, purely based on an On Being broadcast that put me entirely under her spell. Here is a somewhat unassuming poem from her book, Turn Thanks:

Domestic Incense

Just then, in that early afternoon,
I wanted to be that simple woman
who had cooked you Saturday soup

using all golden foods. Bellywoman
pumpkin, yellow yams, sweet potato,
carrots and deep ivory bones of beef.

I would bear it to you in an enamel bowl,
the smell of fragrant thyme and pimento
would waft, domestic incense, as I go.

How the hot Scotch Bonnet pepper
would issue its flavor through
the ripened walls of its own skin

but because like our love its seeds
can scorch, I’d be careful to remove it
before it cooked itself into breaking.

—Lorna Goodison, from Turn Thanks (University of Illinois Press, 1999)

And, really, how lovely in a world of war and contagion, that there is still soup — and poets to recall us, if not to our ideal selves, then somewhere else.

So, if I have an assignment for you this week, it’s just this. Maybe you’re entirely satisfied with your life, but if you — for a few hours — could be someone else (Lion Tamer or Soup Maker), what would that someone be?

Lorna Goodison

Where to find me

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