Antechamber and Other Poems, Michael McClure's latest book with New Directions, joins a growing list of contributions that includes the verse collection September Blackberries (1974) and Jaguar Skies (1975) as well as the musical play Gorf (1976). His writing in recent years is "alchemical" in its intent, yet his twin declarations, "Biology Is Politics" and "I Am A Mammal Patriot," perhaps express more accurately both the universality of his outlook and its humane particularity. McClure's mysticism is vigorously scientific. Even the familiar patterned shapes of his poems remind us of the stars in the night sky and those we see when we shut our eyes. In the dancing lines of his newest work--the title poem "Antechamber" most especially--are the whirl of galaxies, the radiance of molecules, the energy lines of the double helix coiling around its core.
Poems explore the murder of a young Chinese American, the author's experiences while traveling through Mexico, and the life of the mythological character, Perseus.
THE STORY: Striving for admission to the League of Superheroes, General Gorgeous is repeatedly thwarted by domestic hassles or by confrontations with The Blue Mutant, an arch villain who bends every effort to locate The Secret--a source of power tha
Huge Dreams republishes two books, out of print for thirty years, which together are a cornerstone of the Beat movement: The New Book/A Book of Torture and Star. Both were influential in expanding poetry into a larger world:the West Coast Beat phenomena, which focused on nature, the environment, antiwar activities, individual anarchism, Zen Buddhism, jazz, and a kind of romantic mystical thought. With these books Michael McClure brought an animal energy and a knowledge of art and physical human nature that was new to the scene. The New Book/A Book of Torture was written spontaneously while McClure was in a "dark night of the soul" brought on by psychedelics. A single long poem of experience and exploration, it offers the means of liberation from the darkness it examines. Star is a wide-ranging book of chalice seeking, spiritual discovery, and political protest, grounded in the emotions and sensations of eros and play.
The running theme in Michael McClure's Simple Eyes & Other Poems is: looking at the world directly. The results are often as disquieting as they are illuminating. In the long title poem, the stanzas on the Persian Gulf War bloom out of images of all wars the poet has known -- the spiritual wars, the napalm and cordite and nuclear wars, and the war against nature -- and become a kind of spiritual autobiography. At the heart of the poetry is McClure's return to the ancient concept of agnosia, the idea of knowing through unknowing, as a way of living in desparate times in which deep human or humane feelings have become almost outlaw.
Rain Mirror," writes Michael McClure, "stands as my most bare and forthright book. It contains two long poems, 'Haiku Edge' and 'Crisis Blossom, ' which are quite disparate from one another." Together, the poems complement each other as do light and dark. "Haiku Edge" is a poem of linked haiku, often humorous, sometimes harsh, and always elegant. "Crisis Blossom," in contrast, is a long poem in three parts that records the author's "state of psyche, capillaries, muscles, fears, boldnesses, and hungers down where they exist without management," and the months of shock and recovery during a psychophysical meltdown.
This essential collection of Michael McClure's poetry contains the most original, radical, and visionary work of a major poet who has been garnering acclaim and generating controversy for more than fifty years. Ranging from A Fist Full, published in 1957, through Swirls in Asphalt, a new poem sequence, Of Indigo and Saffron is both an excellent introduction to this unique American voice and an impressive selection from McClure's landmark volumes for those already familiar with his boldly inventive work. One of the five poets who heralded the Beat movement in the 1955 Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, McClure reveals in his poetry a close kinship to Romanticism, Modernism, Surrealism, and Japanese haiku. These poems—grounded in imagination and a profound regard for the natural world—chart a poetic landscape of utter originality.
Rebel Lions, Michael McClure's first book of poetry since the retrospective Selected Poems (1985), spans a decade of profound personal change and poetic evolution for the author. In an introductory note, he provides a backdrop for the collection, which moves from old life to new. McClure's work bursts forth from the matrix of the physical and spiritual. "Poetry is one of the edges of consciousness," he asserts. "And consciousness is a real thing like the hoof of a deer or the smell of a bush of blackberries at the roadside in the sun." In the first section of Rebel Lions, "Old Flames," the poems range from the realistic ("Awakening and Recalling a Summer Hike") to the metaphorical ("The Silken Stitching"), as the poet addresses a life on the verge of transformation. The second section, "Rose Rain," exults in a life transformed through love's alchemy. Rebel Lions closes with "New Brain," poems affirming the freedom of all humankind and matter in the eternal now.
In the Pacific Northwest and the Southeast the Hunt family symbolizes one thing-timber. Hundreds of thousands of acres of timber holdings, the foundation of the Hunt wealth, all controlled by one man, Marvin Hunt. The silver-maned man is the much-despised patriarch of the Hunt family, which consists of six sisters, each a beauty in their own right, and a baby brother with John Kennedy-like good looks and style. But Marvin, through his callous and unscrupulous past, has driven unseen predators, from outside and within the family, to a course of deception and death in an attempt to destroy the family and greedily seize the rights to the timber holdings for clear-cutting and a quick sale to Asian markets. TIMBER's cutting edge touches on controversial environmental decisions that took place in the Pacific Northwest during the timber crisis in the 1990's, and the dilemma now facing the Southeast with the explosion of chip mills and their devastation of the forests in the region.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.