A valuable companion to take along on the adventure of life

Reading Quantum Meditations is an adventure and, like everyone knows, adventures take patience and time to bring their rewards each step of the way. 

The best way to read this book is to sit down with it and take your time to savor each poem as you would a fine meal that is served in multiple courses, each one delivered when the one you’ve been enjoying has been savored and it is time to  move on to the next. If you’re looking for a fast food kind of book, you’re better off looking elsewhere. But if it’s wisdom that you’re seeking, this book is a wonderful companion to spend some quality time with.

As the great mystics and poets have shown us so well, change sometimes appears to occur suddenly when all the pieces come together. In “Quantum Leap” (page 51), PD allen writes:

“Change in a complex

system occurs incrementally

bit by bit

below the surface

while the system as

a whole appears stable until

some critical threshold

is exceeded. And then

the entire system appears

to change in one instantaneous

bound.”

The key word and concept is “incrementally”, the way our universe was created in the cataclysmic explosion we call “The Big Bang”.

The first poem, in the section called “Opening Enigma”, is “The Flame”:

“I am the flame,

    not the reflection

I am the flame,

                           undisturbed

                                               by the fluttering

                           of the moths.

I am the flame.”

In his commentary on the Opening Enigma series (page 221), he writes: “Our journey begins with the unanswerable riddle of who we are. There are no words to answer this riddle, but if you look within  you will find the answer. We are that which is forever outside of its definition. We are that which defines itself.” 

So take your time with this great book.  Breathe calmly and deeply, linger with each poem, taste each syllable and sound. There are three volumes of Quantum Meditations now available to take with us on our journey through life. It doesn’t matter how old or young you are (I am 78); what matters is that we learn to live our lives consciously and without fear. 

“Have wings that feared ever 

touched the sun?

I was born when all I once

feared -- I could

love.”

 
-- Rabia of Basra, c. 717-801

In “Our Song” (page 49), he writes:

“The world sings for me

All I need do

      is listen.”

PD Allen’s Quantum Meditations is a valuable addition to meditation literature. You will never finish reading it, just as I never finish reading those books in my library from which I draw sustenance and insight.

This book is a clear 5 star read, one that I highly recommend.

A beautiful, profound book of poetry by one of the best

“Poetry slows us down, cherishes small details. A large disaster erases those details. We need poetry for nourishment and for noticing, for the way language and imagery reach comfortable into experience, holding and connecting it more successfully than any news channel we could name.” About her “Palestinian grandmother who lived till she was 106” she has this to say: “She wanted people to worship in whatever ways they felt comfortable. To respect one another, sit together around the fire cracking almonds and drinking tea, and never forget to laugh no matter what horrible things they had been through. What wisdom,” she asks, “did  she know that all these men can’t figure out?” (from the Introduction.)

In “Different ways to pray”, she writes

“There was the method of kneeling,

a fine method, if you lived in a country

where stones were smooth.

Women dreamed wistfully of

hidden corners where knee fit rock.

their prayers, weathered rib bones,

small calcium words uttered in sequence,

as if this shedding of syllables could

fuse them to the sky.

There were men who had been shepherds so long

they walked like sheep.

Under the olive trees, they raised their arms --

Hear us! We have pain on earth!

We have so much pain there is no place to store it!

 But the olives bobbed peacefully

in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme.

At night the men ate heartily, flat bread

    and white cheese,

and were happy in spite of the pain,

because there was also happiness.

In “Passing the refugee camp” she writes after describing how

“Yesterday the soldiers smashed

Lena’s sink and tub and tiles” and

“They whipped a father in front of his sons

ages 2 and 4” and later

“On the steps of the National Palace Hotel

soldiers peel oranges

throwing back their heads so the juice

runs down their throats” she asks

They know what sweetness lives within

How can they know this and forget

so many other things?”

It is difficult for me to pick poems in this wonderful book that are favorites, because so many of them are. Painful, beautiful, poignant, wonderful poems. In “All things not considered”, she has this to say:

“You cannot stitch the breath

back into this boy.

A brother and sister were playing with toys

when their room exploded.

In what language 

is this holy?

TheJewish boys killed in the cave

were skipping school, having an adventure.

Asel Asleh, Palestinian, believed in the field

beyond right and wrong where people

    come together

to talk. He kneeled to help someone else

stand up before he was shot.

If this is holy,

could we have some new religions please?”

In “Blood”, she writes:

I call my father, we talk around the news.

It is too much for him,

neither of his two languages can reach it.

I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,

to plead with the air.

Who calls anyone civilized?

Where can the crying heart graze?

What does a true Arab do now?

I first encountered Naomi Shihab Nye when I read one of her poems, “Kindness” that  haunted me until I found the book it was in and bought it. She is also the author of the young adult  novel “Habibi”, which I have also reviewed, and other novels and poetry collections. 

This is a book I keep nearby to read again and again and again. Go to your nearest bookstore and buy a copy. Get one from amazon.com or The Book Depository. But get one,read them out loud and listen to the voices there. 

Stories and poems about Northern Ireland by a master storyteller and poet

“Haunting Tales and Living Verse of Ulaid: Ghosts across our landscape”, by Colin T. Mercer. Night Publishing, October 2011. Kindle and paperback

Colin Mercer’s collection of poems and stories of Northern Ireland (“Ulaid”) is an absolute gem of a book. Some of the stories are laugh-out-loud funny, others poignant, others about ghosts and body snatchers in the 1700s, Viking raids still earlier; Ireland’s coastal waters, the heather, mountains, weather. I came away from the book feeling steeped in Ireland and the Irish, reminded of good friends who recently spent a month or so exploring the land of her ancestors.

There is so much loveliness in this book that it’s difficult to point to favorites. “Resurrection Men”, about body snatchers in the 1700s left me laughing out loud, as do several others, including “Catching the Train”, a poignant story that ends ... well, I won’t spoil it for you, but I’m still laughing.

There are stories about illness, mothers, grandmothers and losing one’s childhood innocence one day that recalled “the Troubles” and, for me, in “My Troubled Playground of 1976”, the tragedy of Gaza and the West Bank where children lose their innocence, and sometimes their lives.

Colin Mercer is a wonderful poet and storyteller. He is also the author of “For Irish Eyes” (2009), available in paperback from amazon.com.

“Ghosts across our landscape” is a book I will read again and again, savoring each reading like a good piece of chocolate or a fine wine.

Edwin Thumboo, ed. & Words: Poems Singapore and Beyond. Singapore: Ethos Books, 2010. 264 pp. ISBN 978-981-08-6321-0.

There are several ways one can read Edwin Thumboo’s poetry anthology: First, as a collection of Singaporean poetry in English; second, as poetry written in World Englishes, showing “how the shared experience of colonialism and recovery from it... generates common responses” (11) to it; third, as an outstanding collection, in English, of poetry from the richly diverse racial, linguistic and cultural traditions of Singapore and beyond. My approach to & Words: Poems Singapore and Beyond is to simply enjoy it as an outstanding poetry collection and, as Professor Thumboo suggests, a resource for students of Singaporean poetry written in and translated into English.

& Words: Poems Singapore and Beyond is one of the most enjoyable poetry anthologies I have read in some time. It reminds me, in its depth and range, of Scottish poet Kenneth White’s massive Open World: The Collected Poems, 1960- 2000, a book that I return to again and again to enjoy the poems and plumb their depth. Edwin Thumboo’s anthology has the same depth and range. There is so much richness here that I carry the book with me when I ride the bus and subway or sit in my favourite coffee shop. As I sip my coffee, I read: “Across the shores, divided by a straits and separated by a/ generation gap,/ Lies the Magpie Bridge,/ A bridge linking historical Malay peninsula history and/ modern-day Singapore-Malaysia ties/ Who is the cowherd, who is the weaver girl?/ Where lies the Milky Way and whom is the Queen Mother of the West?” (“Crossing Paths – North, South, East, West” 209-10). I am no longer sitting in my favourite Starbucks in Sapporo, Japan; I am standing on Magpie Bridge, crossing paths with so many people from so many places, doing one of my favourite things: listening to the sound of varied languages as they pour back and forth

Do I have any favourites in this collection? Yes; so many that the Table of Contents is strewn with tiny pencilled checkmarks identifying them. Here are but a few. Edwin Thumboo’s powerful “May 1954” is a memorable one: “We do but merely ask/ No more, no less, this much: That you white man.../ See well enough, relinquish,/ Restore this place, this sun/ To us... and the waiting generations./ Depart white man./ Your minions riot among/ Our young in Penang Road/ Their officers, un-Britannic,/ Full of service, look/ Angry and short of breath./ You whored on milk and honey/ Tried our spirit, spent our muscle,/ Extracted from our earth;/ Gave yourselves superior ways/ At our expense, in our midst,/ Depart:/ You knew when to come;/ Surely know when to go.../ Gently, with ceremony;/ We may still be friends,/ Even love you... from a distance” (71). The poem’s striking images capture my attention with this insistent message: Hey, white man, pay attention! It is 1954 and people have grown tired of colonialism’s power brokers and their minions. The poem’s visceral images command attention again today, as they did in May 1954 when five hundred Chinese Middle School students clashed with the police over the National Service Ordinance the British government attempted to enforce in Singapore. Angering Chinese Middle School students, who felt they were being compelled to defend the same British order that had discriminated against them and in which they saw no future, riots ensued. Soon the British government was gone and Singapore was a nation.

Another favourite is Theophilus Kwek’s “Worship.” Its last six lines are so surprising they are breathtaking: “her prayers were for neither her nor us,/

(and hence needed no god), but for her hands/ that kept us, her feet that carried us, her mouth/ that taught us, and her eyes that wept/ for us, gems glistening in the light/ of a different kind of worship” (41). Then there is Aaron Lee’s “A Tiny Idea” (99); Alfian Sa’at’s “The Portrait of a Sentenced Library” (81) (the title alone captured my attention); then Boey Kim Cheng’s “Child” (114); Gwee Li Sui’s “Jurassic Gardens” (141); Lynette Lim’s “The English Teacher” (162); Kirpal Singh’s “My Tree” (189); K.T.M. Iqbal’s “The Children of Robinson Road” (143) and Amiroudine’s “Urban Riches”: “The last village life/ is flying at half-mast/ In the name of progress/ villages are being clipped like nails” (225; translated by Azhagiya Pandiyan) – a stunning, memorable, visual image. All these and I haven’t even mentioned Kirpal Singh’s wonderful haiku: “In your loving arms/ my tired head/ – hours fly us by” (229). There is a novel in these ten simple words. Of the seven haiku in the book – four of them by Japanese haiku poets – Kirpal Singh’s is my hands down favourite because it is so tender, clean and clear.

For a European-American like myself, & Words is an introduction to a part of the world most of us are unfamiliar with. For me personally, it is a reintroduction to studies that fascinated me fifty and more years ago. Selfishly, I hope the book achieves a wide readership in the Europe and the Americas; it certainly deserves it.

This review was first published in Asiatic Journal of English Language and Literature, Vol. 5, No. 1, June 2011

Street-centered poetry from a tough part of town

I’ve read enough about Hull, England, to know that it has gone through some rough times, has some mean streets and probably more than a fair share of drugs and too much booze to lubricate and sooth the experience, and has experienced a creative renaissance since the arrival of poet Philip Larkin some years ago. As his publisher says, Mike Watts writes poetry that “looks like Hull, it sounds like Hull and it smells like Hull, a place we are all proud to come from, even if we don't always enjoy the experience of being there at the time.” I can think of any number of cities in the U.S. and elsewhere that fit this description. Though I’ve never lived in one, from reading Mike Watts’ fine book, I can imagine what it's like.

There are some gritty poems in this book, like “Cider Barry”, “Two Things”, “Chaos Magnet” or “Me”. in Cider Barry, “My mate’s a boozer,/ Always smashed on cider,/ Always lost in space,/ Wind milling/ All over the place./ And it troubles me./ It’s horrible./ … He’s no different from me;/ Good home,/ Good family,/ No trauma,/ No tragedy.” Puts a fellow in an awful dilemma. “Come on just a fiver/ You know I’d do the same for you.”/ I know I shouldn’t,/ But tell me,/ What would you do?”

In “Me”, “I’m afraid of change,/ I’m afraid to change,/ I can’t explain why./ Perhaps this life will do./ Perhaps this life will have to do.” “You want to see angry?” he asks in “Chaos Magnet”; “I’ll show you angry./ Try spending a day in the life of me,/ Try fighting chaos constantly.”

Did I say “gritty”? Gritty and hopeless when faced with a life that looks dead-ended in a dead-end kind of place. But is life limited to that? No, but circumstances can make it seem as though it is, especially when booze and drugs are stirred into the mix.

Mike Watts is one of the leaders of the ThisisUll stable of poets, writers and musicians in Hull, England. You can check them out at http://www.thisisull.com/

Five stars for this one.

Unforgettable poems

I like the kind of poetry that draws me in, engages me and keeps me coming back again and again. Michelle Young writes that kind of poetry: Surprising, passionate, tender and in a poem about postpartum depression, as bleak as a desert of ice. I've never in my life read a poem as effective as Post Natal, even from women I've known who have suffered from it. I am chilled, but feel compassion, which is what such a poem should bring out in a reader.

Her poem The Relinquishment is the kind of poem that gets you thinking; "Dead Dogs and Dragons" is a wonderfully magical poem about childhood and memory; Let It Be a song about growing old and coming home to a recently empty house after a beloved spouse spouse has died; Blackpool Beach a moving poem about a young mother and her two sons, one of them severely handicapped.

Of All Things is a book that will remain high on my reading list for a long time to come. Available in paperback and Kindle.

A very solid 5 Star book.

David Cooke's "In the Distance" -- An unforgettable collection that keep me coming back again and again

A review of David Cooke’s In the Distance”, Night Publishing, March 26, 2011.

The poems in this book are the kind one visits time and again, as with old friends, to pick up new nuances of meaning, and the simple enjoyment of memory. They are northern poems with northern landscapes, rhythms and winds; poems that put me in a reflective mood and get me to thinking. I am put in mind of some of my favorite poets: Kenneth White, Mary Oliver, and Naomi Shihab Nye.

Scottish poet Kenneth White says that a poem is the shortest form of short story. The final stanza from David Cooke’s “A House in Mayo” illustrates that point very well:

    Empty houses were scars on the landscape.

Wild seeds blew in to heal them. When people

vanished, the tracks they had made were smothered.

Returning, all I ever found were mine.

The house itself, “So long abandoned … lay caged in the tangle of briars.” A child looks for secrets, returns to find only his own tracks, and takes away memories.

One of my favorite poems in this collection is “Visiting”, which the author wrote in honor of his grandfather.

When once, as a clean-kneed

child from town, I first came

on a visit to your limewashed

house, your two great fists

    impressed me, for they

were ponderous chunks

    of granite, notched

carelessly for fingers

    and which, at your own willed

creation, you had torn

from the heart of the land.

Yes, I knew then how

    you had risen and, separate,

must have kept on walking.

I was almost frightened

to be your friend, but still

    am running so breathlessly

beside you as you stride

onwards, the castle of yourself,

across rough fields

    of thistle and clover.

And the dogs are running

before us, and our laughter

creates again a flawless sky.

There’s a complete story in this poem that gets my imagination soaring. The images of David Cooke’s poems pull me in and bring me back again and again, as all great poetry does.

“In the Distance” is a definite 5 star poetry collection, a “must add” to my bookshelf (most of which, these days, inhabits my Kindle). Paperback or Kindle, add this to your “must have” list, or pick up a copy now. I can’t get enough of it.

“David Cooke was born in 1953 in Wokingham, Berkshire, although his family comes from the West of Ireland. In 1977, whilst he was an undergraduate at Nottingham University, his poetry gained him a Gregory Award. His poems and reviews have been published widely in the UK, Ireland, and mainland Europe. A collection, 'Brueghel’s Dancers', was published in 1984. After a long silence he has returned to writing. 'In the Distance' reprints work which has long been out of print alongside a generous sampling of previously uncollected work.” — from Amazon.com

Mary Oliver, a Thirst for life and light

“My work is loving the world,” poet Mary Oliver writes in the first line of her opening poem “Messenger”.

Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—

            equal seekers of sweetness.

Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.

Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

“Are my boots old?” she asks, “Is my coat torn?

Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me

            keep my mind on what matters,

which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be

            astonished.”

It “is mostly rejoicing,” she continues, “since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart

            and these body-clothes,

a mouth with which to give shouts of joy

            to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug up clams,

telling them all, over and over, how it is

            that we all live forever.

There is a joyance here … and sadness and yearning for the love lost when her partner of more than forty years died of cancer the year before these poems were published. “When I think of her,” she writes in “Those Days”, “I think of the long summer days/ she lay in the sun, how she loved the sun, how we/ spread our blanket, and friends came, and” what life was like until she died.

Light flows from the branches of trees. “Stay awhile,” they call in her poem “When I Am Among the Trees”; “It’s simple,” they say,/ “and you too have come/ into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled/ with light, and to shine.”

Mary Oliver has a hunger and a thirst for life and love, a joyance about life that comes from gratitude, and a kindness about her that is so appealing.

If you enjoy good poetry, Thirst will be a treasure on your shelf to be read again and again as I have done and do.

Poet Kenneth White's collected poems, "Open World"

                                        "... the surface of things

                                          can give enjoyment or disgust

                                       but the inwardness of things

                                                  gives life."

                                                           

Those four lines from his long poem "Walking the Coast" (Open World, XII, page 138) about says it all, especially when the "inwardness of things" is deeply embedded in the world, its life, its oceans, its ancient history and its deep inner- and interconnections and connectivity. For Kenneth White, founder of what is called "Geopoetics", "geo" meaning "the earth", poetry is a way of telling story about the earth and its people, about everyday life in relation to the earth and to earthiness.

"Le Nouvel Obsrvateur", Paris, says Kenneth White "is bound to appear as the foremost English-language poet of these times.", I agree. Every time I pick up the book and begin reading, I discover something new, or something old that strikes me in a new way and a deeper level.

I first ran across Kenneth White and his poetry in books by J. Philip Newell, looked everywhere for his books (some of them listed at very high prices), then found "Open World" on amazon.com and bought it. To my delight, it contained the very books I had been looking for!

Open World comprises his collected poetry from 1960 to 2000. Each time I pick it up and open it, I find new things that I'd had missed in a previous reading, like finding gold where you had looked before and there, on a second or third or fourth digging, there it is, right before your eye.

Born in Glasgow in 1936 and raised in western Scotland, Kenneth White is also an essayist, travel writer and held the chair of 20th Century Poetics at the Sorbonne from 1983-1996.

If you haven't heard of Kenneth White, buy this book and read it; it's become one of the most important books in my library. He's one of the poets I recommend to everyone.

Stella Evelyne Tesha, "A Journey Into Life"

 

In "A Journey Into Life", Stella Tesha takes us on a journey of life from Europe to the villages of Africa and back again. Nothing hidden here. These are straightforward poems written from the heart.

A young woman asks her lover "Would I be enough for you" forever? A girl lies in bed thinking of her new husband "old enough to be her grandpa." An eleven year old girl becomes bride eligible when she experiences her first menses, and her mother holds her weeping in her arms while her father, overjoyed at the bride price of a cow, looks at all the ways their lives will be better when the cow is brought home.

In "I'm always so hungry", an orphan girl roams the streets of a city stealing food. Outrunning her pursuers and the stones they throw,she thinks: "Why am I running away?/ If the big stones get me / then hunger will be gone. / I'm always so hungry. I'm hungry to be a child."

In "I am Africa", Ms. Tesha says "Try to remember that." You don't feel the pain that I feel, that I see. When you give aid (or refuse it), "all you give is aid. I am Africa, and that won't change." Try to remember that.

The love poems express her love for her daughter, her sweetheart, love and life. Her heart is big, it encompasses much. "A Journey into Life" is a book I will go on mining for the rest of my life. I recommend it.

Paperback: 96 pages

Publisher: AuthorHouse (February 2, 2010) 

"My poems are written by a spirit on a stone"

www.reddragonflypress.org

"My poems are written by a spirit on a stone." So begins the first poem in this exquisite little book. 

If you're not familiar with Freya Manfred's poetry, this book is an excellent place to begin. If you are familiar with her poetry, add this to your collection. Reading it is a deep and rich experience. She is close to nature, to people and to self. Read the poems out loud. Take them with you. Sneak looks when you're supposed to be listening to a professor or a friend. Sit in a park, sniff the air, watch birds. "I was married here by Eagle Rock," she says in "Blue Mound, Luverne, Minnesota", the last poem in the book; "Before that I ran away to write poems." I understand that well. Seated at my desk in Sapporo, Japan, I smell the fragrant air as it blows across Blue Mound and recall the times when I stood by Eagle Rock and dreamed. "Swimming With a Hundred Year Old Snapping Turtle" is a treasure.

"Swimming With a Hundred Year Old Snapping Turtle" is available from Red Dragonfly Press, Northfield, Minnesota, www.reddragonflypress.org.

A Poetic Interlude

Macaw in winter

1

Too cold for an old
red macaw perched

outside the door of a
Kushiro pet shop this

December day. But
there he is

hunkered down,
grooming his feathers

in the cold winter wind
as snowflakes begin to fall.

2

Today the old red macaw
is on his perch munching seeds
as the arctic wind whips past.

Does he dream
of steaming tropical
forests?

--Kushiro, December 2007