D.S. Martin is Series Editor for the new Poiema Poetry Series from Cascade Books.
The third book in The Poiema Poetry Series is Within This Tree of Bones: New and Selected Poems by Robert Siegel. (Publication date: 01/07/2013)
Robert Siegel is the author of five poetry collections; he has also written several novels, including the Whalesong trilogy which has been translated into seven languages. For 23 years he directed the graduate creative writing progam at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he is Professor Emeritus.
To purchase Within This Tree of Bones visit: Wipf & Stock.
“Written over five decades, these poems begin fixed in the human condition, our common experience of an imperfect world. Slowly, under the aegis of the Spirit, they move toward a brighter vision of things: they ask us to “dream in that fecund darkness until all shapes are shining.” Poetry offers us an experience of union with the alarming and enthralling world we live in, as well as glimpses of what transcends it and is beyond language. It reminds us that all is connected and supports the hope that light will triumph. The author trusts that these poems may do the same as they explore the chain of being from animal to human, from serpent to angel—and that joy is the final dominant note.”
The second book in the series is Epitaph’s For the Journey: New, Selected and Revised Poems by Paul Mariani. (Publication date: 05/18/2012)
Paul Mariani is the author of seven poetry collections. He is also known for the biographies he’s written of poets, such as William Carlos Williams (for which he was a finalist for the American Book Award), John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and, most recently, Gerard Manley Hopkins.
To purchase Epitaphs for the Journey visit: Wipf & Stock.
In Epitaphs for the Journey: New, Selected and Revised Poems, Paul Mariani revisits forty years of writing poems, including revising many of his earlier lyrics, to shape his latest volume into a life lived and lived again over the past seven decades. The eight sections—or cantos—each composed of twelve poems, cover roughly a decade apiece and contour Mariani’s search for answers to the constant interplay of the felt presence of the Mystery we call God as it plays with the modern imagination. Mariani’s background is Catholic and broadly classic, and warmly embraces all aspects of Christianity and Judaism and the world even beyond those.
Our first book in the series is Six Sundays Toward a Seventh: Spiritual Poems by Sydney Lea. (Publication date: 01/01/2012)
Sydney Lea is the author of ten collections of poetry, including Pursuit Of A Wound (2001) which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Lea is the founding editor of New England Review, where he served from 1977 until 1989. He is the new poet laureate of Vermont.
To purchase Six Sundays Toward a Seventh visit: Wipf & Stock.
“These poems—selected from the award-winning poet’s output over four decades—more explicitly than any of his prior volumes address the centrality of Christian vision to his aims and aspirations. Lea looks unflinchingly at all that may challenge his faith: the cruelties of both natural and human worlds, the attractions of jolly, good-hearted secularism, the distortions of doctrinaire religiosity, the seeming pointlessness of untimely deaths; but his faith in Christian redemption shines through even the bleakest of his poems.”
