9/24/2016 BIRD LIGHtBIRD LIGHT by Elizabeth Cohen
Rainer Maria Rilke, nearly 100 years ago ended the first stanza of the Duino Elegies–First Elegy, with this verse. "Throw the emptiness out of your arms to add to the spaces we breathe; maybe the birds will feel the expansion of air, in more intimate flight.”
In BIRD LIGHT, Elizabeth Cohen captures this “more intimate flight” and creates a new poetic language of healing and transformation. She deftly weaves together images of birds and nature that parallel life–changing events. “It happened to me. The Robin Redbreast / the mud swallows on the porch / egrets in the field…the polysyllabic jays / the velvet scrimshaw of my nights etched with bats / all replaced by infinite changeable things / Everyone, everywhere, sleeping with television.” In an elegant and earthly voice, she speaks to us of hidden loss and sorrow, softened by joy and love and living a vibrant life. We are drawn into the conversation in delightful ways, and renewed by a promise healing. ~ Ron Starbuck
9/9/2016 BEARING THE CAST ~ skip renkerBEARING THE CASTSAINT JULIAN PRESS is excited to announce that in the spring of 2017, we will be publishing BEARING THE CAST, a new book of poems by Skip Renker. Many of the poems in Bearing the Cast evoke rivers, real and imagined, where “love undisguised on the waters” can be difficult to bear. By turns wondering, skeptical, humorous, and grateful, these poems seek the sources of paradox: stillness and motion, time and the Divine, love and death, silence and the sounds of owls, horses, trout rising to feed. They explore a world that contains both “dragonflies with side-mounted eyes, impersonal and voracious” as well as barefoot seekers at “the doors of the holy.” These poems urge us to bear, even savor, the world’s cast. Skip Renker has degrees from Notre Dame and Duke and an MFA from Seattle Pacific University. His poems have appeared in California Quarterly, Poetry Midwest, Small Brushes, Spirit First, and numerous other publications, as well as the Atlanta Review, Passages North, and Allegheny River anthologies. He’s published two chapbooks, Birds of Passage (Delta Press), and Sifting the Visible (Mayapple Press), and he conducts workshops and college classes in meditation and writing. Skip’s a father and grandfather, and lives with his wife Julia Fogarty in Midland, MI. |
Publisher's BlogRON STARBUCK is the Publisher/CEO/Executive Editor of Saint Julian Press, Inc., in Houston, Texas; a poet and writer, an Episcopalian, and author of There Is Something About Being An Episcopalian, When Angels Are Born, Wheels Turning Inward, and most recently A Pilgrimage of Churches, four rich collections of poetry, following a poet’s mythic and spiritual journey that crosses easily onto the paths of many contemplative traditions. Archives
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