Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Franciscan Notes

Franciscan Notes

Williamson, Alan

Paperback

General Poetry

ISBN10: 1946482250
ISBN13: 9781946482259
Publisher: Tupelo Press
Published: Nov 1 2019
Pages: 84
Weight: 0.30
Height: 0.20 Width: 6.10 Depth: 8.90
Language: English
The book begins with deaths: chiefly the poet's mother's, but also those of cherished mentors and friends. Poems explore living beyond those deaths and approaching old age, and then do some traveling. Williamson takes a pilgrimage to Japan and India, inspired by his practice of Zen meditation, and placed under the aegis of a saying from the great Rinzai Zen monastery at Daitoku-ji: If you cannot endure this moment, what can you endure? A theme then becomes enduring the public moment, with all its griefs and opportunities for growth. The reader is then transported with the poet to Italy. In 2000, Williamson began visiting Tuscany regularly, and eventually became a property owner there. The poems set in Italy dwell on an encounter with old culture, and its potential to encourage both resignation and mysticism, with moods that persist from the tutelary geniuses of two great Italian poets: the nihilistic Leopardi and the tentatively mystical Montale. Gathering around those experiences multiple lore from music, philosophy and science, it becomes an extended meditation on mental suffering, glimpses of the ecstatic, and the double nature of our life, skull / and beatific face, with the immortal recombinants of fire and water.

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