Katerina Stoykova Klemer’s first book of poems, The Air Around the Butterfly, has recently been published by Fakel Express, a publishing house in Sofia, Bulgeria. While she originally wrote all of these poems in English, she has also translated each of them into her native Bulgarian language and they appear in the book side by side, English and Bulgarian.
Her poetry is elegant, concise, witty, inventive, and often very surprising. She has a knack for bringing inanimate objects (like a spare tire, or letters of the alphabet) to vividly engaging life. Her observations about the world around and within are keen and deeply insightful. Her work is among the most engaging poetry I’ve ever encountered.
I cannot recommend this volume highly enough. Full disclosure: Katerina is a friend and classmate in Spalding University’s brief residency MFA in Writing program, but my personal relationship with her has zero bearing on my deep admiration for her work.
Get this book and savor the poems within. You will not regret it. (It is available to order on Amazon now!)
Namaste.
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Sunday, May 17, 2009
The Peace of Wild Things
Earlier today while taking a short break from preparing for my upcoming MFA residency in Louisville, I was cleaning up the kitchen – while listening to National Public Radio’s Speaking of Faith – and the announcer mentioned that a Wendell Berry poem would be featured in the next segment. Having been assigned some Wendell Berry prose to read in advance of this month’s residency, I turned up the volume and looked forward to hearing the poem. This is the poem Krista Tippett, the show’s host, read:
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry, "The Peace of Wild Things" from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Copyright © 1998.
Wow. Indeed. And all that.
This reminds me so much of what I’ve been reading lately, most especially the works of Eckhart Tolle. It also calls to mind the following well known Biblical verse: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” (Matt. 6:28-29)
Berry writes of the “wild things/who do not tax their lives with forethought/of grief.” Isn’t it interesting that he writes “of” grief rather than the more expected (and, I suppose, more pedestrian) “or” grief? And the idea of “not taxing” one’s life is precisely what Tolle is talking about when he counsels that we should live in the present moment in a spirit of acceptance; for, what is is. And there’s really little we can do to change that. What we can control is what action(s) to we take or not take in response to what is.
The “day-blind stars/waiting with their light” that Berry writes about remind me of Tolle’s reminder that even on a cloudy day, the sun is still there. We simply are not able to see it.
Thank you Mr. Berry. Thank you Ms. Tippett for reading this on today’s program. And thank you wild things for demonstrating peace and living in the now and accepting things as they are each and every day.
Namaste.
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry, "The Peace of Wild Things" from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Copyright © 1998.
Wow. Indeed. And all that.
This reminds me so much of what I’ve been reading lately, most especially the works of Eckhart Tolle. It also calls to mind the following well known Biblical verse: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” (Matt. 6:28-29)
Berry writes of the “wild things/who do not tax their lives with forethought/of grief.” Isn’t it interesting that he writes “of” grief rather than the more expected (and, I suppose, more pedestrian) “or” grief? And the idea of “not taxing” one’s life is precisely what Tolle is talking about when he counsels that we should live in the present moment in a spirit of acceptance; for, what is is. And there’s really little we can do to change that. What we can control is what action(s) to we take or not take in response to what is.
The “day-blind stars/waiting with their light” that Berry writes about remind me of Tolle’s reminder that even on a cloudy day, the sun is still there. We simply are not able to see it.
Thank you Mr. Berry. Thank you Ms. Tippett for reading this on today’s program. And thank you wild things for demonstrating peace and living in the now and accepting things as they are each and every day.
Namaste.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
