Whit Griffin, Pentateuch: The First Five Books
78 pages. ISBN 978-1-907489-03-7
Praise for Whit Griffin:
If the Tao and The Farmers' Almanac produced an offspring it would be Whit Griffin's Pentateuch. A new poet versed in old lore, Griffin invites his readers to contemplate a world built upon the alternating currents of succinct lyric gesture and brambly verdant flora. Herein lies a gallant, quirky garden of curiosities.
Lisa Jarnot
Whit Griffin works with an alchemist's range but stays in the small hours, so one poem can whirl and whirl and so whirl you. A man of civilwarland birth, where none of the old battleground or sweet magnolia or swamp thing is lost on his vista. Count yourself lucky, it's made him some extra fine poetry.
Bob Arnold
There's a good chance these poems could change the way you look at the simplest things: 'Smooth your bed upon rising, lest / someone take possession of your imprint.' Riddle, oracle, proverb, divination; the poems remind us of so much we have forgotten and so much we never knew: 'Man can make gods by the dozen, but not a single worm.' It's as if the words were written back before the world began or were found just after the world had ended - captured now within the pages of a book that has apparently been lost for centuries - opened here in your hand: an almanac of ancient rhymes written for this damaged future. 'We're separated by / degrees of illumination and the shape of our vowels.' Old tales, told anew of magic, promise and betrayal, they remind us to respect - and therefore to remember - both the unknown and the known: 'Imagine what has been lost in the whale's song / now that our boats are no longer built of wood.' The energy their music creates demands that we question the disparity between how our days on this earth are lived and how perhaps they could be lived.
John Phillips
When a non sequitur is juxtaposed with another (seeming) non sequitur, and the two make a simple declarative statement it is time to pay attention. But when a number of them follow in a poem, and all of them mesh, that is mastery. What does one say of a great number of poems which continue this astounding process? Whit's Pentateuch is such a collection, and it is literally breath-taking. There are no 'fillers'. This is a major achievement, and it promises much more. From historical references to chance remembrances of bits from many other sources, to what the poet has invented. There are smiles, outright laughter and far deeper wisdom. This is the work of a master. Bravo, Whit!
Theodore Enslin
Sample Poem
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UK Orders: £8.95 (including postage)
US Orders: $15.00 (including postage)
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Gospel Earth
Jeffery Beam, Gospel Earth
230 pages. ISBN 978-1-907489-01-3 (paper) / 978-907-489-02-0 (cloth)
In its procession through indirection to attention, Gospel Earth, Jeffery Beam's big book of little poems, traces a transcendent open ecstacy & radiant physicality. Bridging aphorisitic compsure, Vedic & Zen alertness & the ecstasy of the Christian, Bhaktic, & Sufi mystics, the poems invoke earth spirits & the luminous power of the Word, breaching the divide between creation & humanity, healing the domination heating the earth & searing our moral compass. The poems animate the natural world beyond the confines of language, demonstrating once again as North Carolina's Independent Weekly stated "how large a canvas he can paint with a few deft strokes". Described by the poet as a work intended to "invigorate the startling propulsion of haiku's accessible simplicity & minimalism", Gospel Earth assembles a new Gnostic gospel, a distinct & astonishing beauty.
Praise for Jeffery Beam:
A Fast Short History of the Small Poem in the 20th Century might be this: Modernism, the luminous fragment: Post-Modernism, destablized morphemes - bringing us to the 21st Century & Jeffery Beam, a mustard seed. To him whose lines trace a world not hinted at, but fleshed out. His poems leave us fortunately told. Carved in reverse on cinnabar or jade, they could be seals. Or legends, clear, crisp stanzas to underline the eye: to open a window in the wall of a page. Mencius suggests that by nurturing what is small, & letting go of what is large, we welcome, not our loss, but our release. I seed every breeze, sings the dandelion, sings every bright syllable in this Gospel Earth.
Thomas Meyer
So minimal & so lush, all at once, their titles become them. Their beauty is about the huge pleasure of omission, & the powerful delicacy of what stays. They are quite sublime. Sacramental. A collection to keep beside a bed. Where they might seep into the sleeping head like pearls. The white page a hand, the poems, tiny snail sheels on the palm for scrutiny. Look even closer, they are even more exquisite.
Ippy Patterson
Reviews
Review by Kimberly Steele
Review by Jaimee Hills
Review by Cy Dillon
Sample Poems
Ordering
Gospel Earth is available in both paper and cloth editions.
UK Orders (paper): £10.95 (including postage)
UK Orders (cloth): £14.95 (including postage)
US Orders (paper): $17.00 (including postage)
US Orders (cloth): $23.50 (including postage)
