Coming To My Senses

Book Description


Coming to My Senses is a collection of old and new poems written over many years in many places. So it is a kind of anthology of my works to date.


In putting it together I looked for common elements in order to group the poems, and found five directions that the poems take: Seeking Passage is about moving through changes in life, looking forward or backward and recognizing the need for change. Of Love and Loss is self explanatory poems responding to the heartache of love and memories gone. Diversions & Reflections are poems of response to the moment, creative outbursts responding to the moment. alludes to the sources of ideas and inspiration, and includes poems exploring the poets role and identity. Coming to my Senses is about finding my place in the here and now through the poetic experience. It is the summing up of my understanding that poetry is not an escape, a frill or a crutch, but a discovery of a deeper reality through giving attention to the sense of the moment.


In The Preface I comment: Writing poems for me has always been an experiment, an extension of awareness, a searching into the internal life of emotion and thought. It has been a practice in reawakening the language by seeking novel ways to put words together, not just for the game of wordplay, but to refocus the mind by bringing attention to the words themselves and the things they point to to see them strangely new, to hear them create music through their rhythm and sound. To gently shake the reader awake, to see in front of them an image perhaps from a dream that may not make much sense, but there it is, in wonder and artistry. There is something still marvelous and meaningful in the world even in its uncertain and elusive presence; if this is not the stuff of poetry, I dont know what is.


Poetry, for me then, is a search and a celebration, a revelation, not an explanation or a comment on the world, but rather a discovery of the inner life of thought and consciousness a coming to my senses and a reawakening of something with reverence.


The poetic moment is a moment that begins and ends in the minds silence, and within that silence is a wide world of timeless utterances, subtle responses and the feeding roots of new ideas. The poetic moment is what ties philosophy to the real world, what demands religion from the questing soul, and what unveils the deeper values in an otherwise common and habitual world.


These poems are records of some of these moments. They are meditations and reflections more than they are compositions. The form each poem takes arises from the moment that still point of the turning world from the attempt to dissolve the outer consciousness and reach a pure state of cognition, the origin of the question: What is it in this life that seeks for something more? There is something wistful in each attempt to find an answer, and though the answer is in the end a mystery we must not forget that moment of illumination in which we first discovered that mystery gives birth to imagination who, like a child, gleams at every new thing.