The Burl Becomes The Blossoming

About the Book

Poetry writing has proven proficient at helping me see what is there to be seen. I will see or hear or reflect on something which then provides an image, a nuance that emerges in a word, a line. The single line and image, written, provides a cadence, a focus of sound and echo that invites a second line, and more. Usually, they come quickly and run until they tell me they are done and the poem is complete. This book draws upon such poems over a pair of sweeps of my history plus a sampling of more current poems that strike me as desirable in this collection. These pieces of my past often recollect for me the occasion but also leave that occasion obscured and allow the poem to do its work of creating an image and a flow in my own mind. The poems, in my experience, write their meaning on my mind. And, I hope, on yours as well. For then the poems do their work.

About the Author

I am a retired minister from the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) living in central Illinois. During the course of my ministry, noting that some of my work came with a special sort of cadence, I began writing poetry on purpose; that was in the early 1980s. The process and product of writing poetry has been useful and satisfying to me over the years. In April 2004 I began a few years of fruitful attendance on the poetry website DesertMoonReview.com. I learned a great deal about poetry in that attendance - its reading as well as the writing. I have frequently shared poems with the particular "muses" who occasioned the poems. I now live in retirement with my wife of fifty-four years, two dogs and several cats.