The first review of Birds Nobody Loves is up at bhulbhulaiyan:

I was amazed that I would even like pieces about birds- let alone, ones nobody loves. I mean, I could imagine poems about blue birds and peacocks and the like…but grackles?? Number one, what in heaven’s name is a grackle? To my amazement, I enjoyed each piece. By the third read, I was seeing layers in some of the pieces…wise layers…intriguing layers. I knew this was a keeper.

Thanks, Anjuli!

Dark and Like a Web: Brief Notes On and To the Divine (Broiled Fish & Honeycomb Nanopress, 2011) by Nic Sebastian and edited by Beth Adams has been following me around in my bag and on my phone for several months now. There is a lot of weight in this short collection of 15 poems, and it may not be too much to say I love this book.

Sebastian traces a spiritual path that resonates with me for its recognition of the longing for what is often right in front of us, though unnoticed and forgotten in the action and busyness of life. We wind up seeking something that’s really never very far at all. Sebastian doesn’t attempt to directly define the divine and I like that too. There are more questions than answers here creating an openness and space for the reader to enter and follow along on a shared journey.

In her introduction, Sebastian writes of being sick for silence and stillness which is where I was when I picked the book up last year.

my days are flocks of starlings
wheeling dark waves
of loud chatter

—”my days are flocks of starlings”

A year ago, I found myself “sick for silence” and set out to get back into my habit of walking and writing small stones, a kind of active meditation or prayer, if you will. Those starlings (well, they’d be grackles down here) can get out of hand… loud and noisy nuisance birds, flying in all directions, crapping on everything. With all that going on, it’s easy to forget to be awed by nature, the trees dropping leaves, the birds on their great journeys, even those starlings. To lose this is to close off an important path toward the divine, to stick with the poet’s usage, which I rather like.

home
because my breath ends
in silver plainchant
and woven silence
in you

—”the names of my breath”

There are other journeys too of course, those not marked by miles. The one called parenthood that we’re on now spirals, at this point anyway, deeper into home. My son who has the past week discovered consonants and repeats them endlessly, delightedly, as if singing the most wonderful song seems to me a gift… something so undeserved and precious as to make us wonder how we didn’t know he was missing during the years before he came. He sings his babbling song, we sing back, he responds with laughter and raspberries.

your step is like a small flame
and a song unfurling

—”antiphony in the hills”

Sebastian’s language and imagery—landscapes that evoke the widest vistas and the narrowest paths—are vibrant. This is a book that takes the reader on 15 journeys, each longer and deeper than the relatively brief poems that contain them. The journeys, of course, are one journey leading back to wholeness.

when I have readied myself

I rise whole from the pool at sunrise
and step into you as onto a straight road

—”when you come to me in the dark of night”

Oddly, or maybe not, this book speaks to me most of the end of journeys in which we may have experienced something of what exists behind nature, community, communion, and silence that can’t really be described or explained. It’s not nothing. It’s not imaginary. And in opening ourselves to it, we can find the recognition, warmth, healing and mystery that fill us up with an awe and wonder the way a woodpecker’s rhythm in the trees, a scorpion’s path along the road, the touch of a loved one or a baby’s laughter do.

In this book I’m reminded of the importance of finally coming home. Whatever that might mean to any given reader.

I’m thrilled to announce that my first poetry collection Birds Nobody Loves: A Book of Vultures & Grackles is now live.

Here’s where you can go to get a copy:

Paperback edition on Amazon

Paperback edition at my CreateSpace store

Or if you have one of them new-fangled e-reader contraptions, it’s available in both Kindle and EPUB format (it looks startlingly nice on the iPad I borrowed on which to test it):

Kindle edition at Amazon

EPUB edition (for iPad, iPhone and most other readers) at Lulu

It’s also available in the iBookstore.

These birds will continue to fly around the internet and automatically take up roost in many other online booksellers over the next few weeks.

I hope you’ll consider ordering a copy. Thanks also to all of you who’ve read and commented on these poems as they’ve appeared on this blog and in various other venues over the past three years.

Almost three years ago, I started writing poems about vultures and grackles because, well, someone had to do it. I imagined eventually putting them together into a short collection and now that collection is about finished. Birds Nobody Loves: A Book of Vultures & Grackles is in its final proof stage and will (barring unforeseen complications) become available for order/download next week, probably Tuesday or Wednesday. More details and links to follow.

It’s been an interesting road to this point, writing these poems and trying to decide what to do with them beyond sharing them here. I’ve learned a lot about two of the most common and least-liked birds around here (the turkey and black vultures, the great-tailed and common grackles) and even more about crafting poems. Readers of this blog will have read earlier drafts of most of these poems here or at one of the online journals kind enough to publish them*, so they’re available around these parts, though many of them have undergone revision.

Not long ago, I came to the conclusion that the thing that made the most sense to me was to go ahead and publish this myself. In large part because I just love the fact that I live in a world where I can. That thrills me. I registered Coyote Mercury Press at the county clerk’s office, bought some ISBN numbers (I have a few other projects up my sleeve), and set the title up using Createspace. It will be available in multiple formats: paperback, .epub (for iPad, Nook and Sony), .mobi (for Kindle) and likely .pdf as well.

I’ll write some more about this between now and next week, and I plan to give away 5 paperback copies to anyone with a blog who might like to write a review or do an interview or whatever else. If you’re interested or would just like to receive an email when it’s available with links for ordering/downloading, let me know using the contact form above.

Update: The 5 review copies are now spoken for.

—

*Bolts of Silk, Thirteen Myna Birds, a handful of stones, Four and Twenty, tinywords, Houston Literary Review, Pay Attention: A River of Stones Anthology, Nothing. No One. Nowhere., qarrtsiluni, and Curio Poetry

I saw this video Beth Adams posted at Cassandra Pages a month or so ago and keep coming back to it as I start off on another River of Stones challenge. I began 2011 the same way and resolved to maintain the daily practice for a full year, at least. I made it to August 23 and then… school started, I ran out of ways to say the drought was slowly killing my state, it was too hot and the air too full of smoke and ash to want to go outside. Other things to do, and then, the world just went right on. It started raining (not enough, but it did) the weather cooled, I started sleeping again and then the year was at its end.

For the previous two years I’ve picked some favorite stones and made them into a chapbook to give away, but there wasn’t one for 2011. I just didn’t have time, couldn’t make the time (but mark did and he said his lovely Postmarks chap was partially inspired by my gnarled oaks) and then… I don’t know, I just wound up feeling like I’d let go of something important that I hadn’t meant to let slip and that was the practice of seeing, paying attention, and then recording my observations. I don’t know if it makes me a better writer to do this, I suppose it does, but I do think it makes me a better, or perhaps, more thoughtful person. As I’ve done before here, I paraphrase Pirsig in Motorcycle Maintenance: you are the cycle you’re working on. Writing stones isn’t about the writing, it’s about growing by connecting with a world spinning so fast as to seem out of control.

We have bags of clothes our six-month-old has outgrown. When we went to buy him some new clothes, we were shocked by how small all the three-month-old clothes were. Was he ever really that small? Where did the time go and how on earth did it disappear so quickly. It was only just July.

So, marking time, reflecting on it and slowing it and me down enough to really reside for a few moments in its stream… those are good reasons to start afresh observing and writing stones. As the video above reminds us each year is a collection of days, each kind of the same but passing quickly, sometimes too fast for the eye to take much of it beyond the larger picture. Thus the beauty, the importance, of small stones and the kind of awareness they engender when we set out to really pay attention.

Thanks, Fiona and Kaspa, for the river. I’m eager to dive back in.

I post my stones at my other blog, a gnarled oak. Please stop by and hopefully I’ll make it beyond August 23 this time out.

The same old picture since 2005

What to say about 2011? There are two 2011′s really, neatly divided by a Sunday in late June. Prior to that my year was filled with reading and writing poetry, birding, blogging, the occasional video. The other 2011 was the beginning of parenthood.

It’s hard to imagine any of my previous 41 years have been as life-altering as 2011. Becoming a parent for the first time in June changed every routine in my life. For the better, always for the better, though now that we’re 6 months in we’re finally starting to get some sleep and even a few moments here and there to do things for ourselves. For me, that’s blogging, writing and reading.

Anyway, as usual, here’s my end-of-year reading list. Many of these were chapbooks and most of my reading was done prior to June; in fact, all but the last four were read before June, and I’m not quite through with the last one. Still, here ’tis:

1. Everything’s Eventual – Stephen King
2. American Primitive – Mary Oliver
3. The Planets – Dava Sobel
4. The Gunslinger – Stephen King (reread)
5. American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume 1 – John Hollander, ed.
6. Blameless Mouth – Jessica Fox-Wilson
7. I Am Legend – Richard Matheson
8. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell (reread)
9. Scene of the Accident – Howie Good
10. Disaster Mode – Howie Good
11. Pay Attention: A River of Stones Anthology – Fiona Robyn & Kaspalita, eds.
12. Speaker for the Dead – Orson Scott Card
13. Xenocide – Orson Scott Card
14. Shannon – Campbell McGrath
15. Woods, Shore, Desert – Thomas Merton
16. Love is a UFO – Howie Good
17. The Happiest Baby on the Block – Harvey Karp, MD
18. The Baby Owner’s Manual – Louis Borgenicht, MD & Joe Borgenicht
19. Your Baby’s First Year – The American Academy of Pediatrics
20. What to Expect the First Year – Murkoff, Mazel, Eisenberg & Hathaway
21. Watermark – Clayton T. Michaels (reread)
22. The Book of Ystwyth: Six Poets on the Art of Clive Hicks-Jenkins – Bonta, James, Selch, Urquhart, Davies & Youmans
23. Tender Mercies – mark Stratton
24. Dark & Like a Web: Brief Notes On and To the Divine – Nic Sebastian
25. Children of the Mind – Orson Scott Card
26. Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer – Robert Swartwood, ed.
27. Greeks Bearing Gifts – Joseph Harker
28. Postmarks – mark Stratton
29. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien (reread)

…and a bunch of kids books…

There were no great obsessions this year like last year’s Dark Tower series, though I did go back and reread The Gunslinger. Speaking of rereading, the best book on the list was a reread: Cloud Atlas. Regarding new books, my favorites were probably The Book of Ystwyth, a book so beautiful, I didn’t want to stop looking at it much less reading it. Other favorites were Shannon, Dark and Like a Web and Speaker for the Dead. Of course the run of baby care books were probably the most important and certainly the most useful ones. At 6 months in, though, I find we’re referring to them less and trusting ourselves more.

And though I haven’t been blogging or writing much lately, I have been preparing a short poetry collection. Birds Nobody Loves will be available sometime in mid-January. I’ll post more about it in the coming weeks. Perhaps after I finish that, I’ll start blogging more.

Finally, to those of you who come round here, read and leave comments, thank you. And have a happy 2012.

—

Want to make a fast friend by saving a greyhound in Central Texas? Check these pups out. Or go here to find a greyhound near you. You can also go here to find out why greyhounds are running for their lives.

If you have dogs who need proven leadership, go here to find a cat.

I’m honored to have two poems, “Winter Solstice” and “In the Time of the Automobile” (both from my upcoming collection Birds Nobody Loves–More to come stay tuned) in the inaugural issue of Curio Poetry alongside the work of several other fine poets. Thanks to editors Joseph Harker and Tessa Racht for starting this journal and including some of my work. Now, go check it out.

so many acorns on the ground…
someday I’ll get to explain
these to my little boy
how they become trees
with nothing more than water
sun and a little help
from squirrels and blue jays
things about time and the
distance to the sky
and through years
how the trees will still be young
when he is old and
I am gone and there will
still be acorns on the ground
a trail of breadcrumbs
leading back to a forest where
we all grow toward the light

—

I wrote this last spring when my wife was pregnant and the ground was littered with acorns like I’ve never seen. You couldn’t walk down the street without a constant crunch-crack underfoot, and as I walked the dogs on those spring evenings, my mind was always on my soon-to-arrive son and I wondered—still do—what he’ll make of this world.

Anyway, I forgot I’d written this one and so many months later, when there aren’t so many acorns lying about, here ’tis.

I’ve been carrying mark Stratton’s Tender Mercies (The Pancake Truck Press, 2011) around in my bag for a few months. Mainly it was so I wouldn’t forget to write something about it, but it’s taken me this long. The old blog has fallen down the priority list somewhat these days, but periodically I get the book out, read a few random poems and then stick it back in my bag. Now it’s started to feel like a friend tagging along from place to place offering snapshots and images from dreams and nightmares. It’s a friend who doesn’t explain himself but the conversation is good and usually interesting.

The Cowboy rides
through lead guitar dynamics
a single stream of time
signature changes

–from “Tender Mercy #28D”

That’s the sense I get from Tender Mercies, a collection that began as a series mark posted to his blog about a year ago or so. Sense is a funny thing too, because it doesn’t always make sense to me. I don’t always get what mark’s getting at, but the ride, the language, is a pleasure, and sometimes a line or two finds a place in my mind, takes root and won’t leave me alone. So the book goes back in the bag and I carry it around some more, sometimes forgetting it’s there only to be happily surprised again.

I misplaced my words

I kept them in the lee
Of a tow sail

They went well with
Collard greens
Or a glass of milk.

–from “Tender Mercy #17b”

Earlier this year, mark asked me for feedback on the manuscript and a blurb. I offered those, but I kind of wish I’d had the year to do it. Maybe the blurb would have been better, at any rate. I say that simply because after nearly a year of hanging out with these poems at hospitals, the dentist’s offices, school, who knows where else one finds a few moments to read, I just like them more and more the better I get to know them. I still see a lot of poems about connection and disconnection, love and loss, though, but they get funnier or sharper or wiser with time and rereading. Sometimes more mysterious too. I think good poetry should be like that.

Toxic rains fall not
from only the heavens.
Domestic gods and
Dusting share the blame.

–from “Tender Mercy #14″

In addition to Tender Mercies, mark has just released a limited edition chapbook called Postmarks. There’s also an interesting interview with mark at Jessie Carty’s blog. mark blogs at AGGASPLETCH.