It makes me happy to announce the publication of my book of poems, Contagious Magic: Collected Poems.
"Always light-gathering, these poems move back and forth among the places that have been essential to the poet's life—New Mexico and the southwest, old Roman vestiges in northern Italy, a longtime home next to a synagogue in northern California, the color-drenched French countryside of artist Pierre Bonnard. The magic of the title is carried by spices and pigments, water and birds, bright strings of turquoise and branches of pine. As traveler, word-peddler, and celebrant of joie de vivre, the poet's quest has been to gather luminous ingredients wherever they are found."
Written over a large span of my life, and every so often published in journals, some of them, the poems were gathered with others and ordered differently for a Continuing Studies class at Stanford several years ago, then put back in a drawer. When the threat of the Coronavirus came upon us in early March, I decided I wanted most of all to spend my hours (final if they should be) getting my favorite poems of the collection out into the world, as a kind of memoir.
My preface explains the title (timely, but coincidental):
"Always light-gathering, these poems move back and forth among the places that have been essential to the poet's life—New Mexico and the southwest, old Roman vestiges in northern Italy, a longtime home next to a synagogue in northern California, the color-drenched French countryside of artist Pierre Bonnard. The magic of the title is carried by spices and pigments, water and birds, bright strings of turquoise and branches of pine. As traveler, word-peddler, and celebrant of joie de vivre, the poet's quest has been to gather luminous ingredients wherever they are found."
Written over a large span of my life, and every so often published in journals, some of them, the poems were gathered with others and ordered differently for a Continuing Studies class at Stanford several years ago, then put back in a drawer. When the threat of the Coronavirus came upon us in early March, I decided I wanted most of all to spend my hours (final if they should be) getting my favorite poems of the collection out into the world, as a kind of memoir.
My preface explains the title (timely, but coincidental):
James Frazer, British anthropologist and author
of The Golden Bough, said that contagious magic
has to do with the associations between things. "Things that have been either in physical contact
or in spatial or temporal association with other
things retain a connection after they are separated." (Phillips Stevens, Jr., Skeptical Inquirer, Nov/Dec 2001)
The Hawaiian religion calls it aka, these bonds or shadow cords connecting us elsewhere, animating our being from however far away.
My life has been rich with resonances of this sort. Thunder rumbling in purple canyons holding the ruins of Anasazi dwellings; the evening air holding the memory of temple bells. Words carry magic. For me, each poem is an incantation, a small spell marrying sage maybe to red ochre and chile pods,
contagious in the sense of
passing on chance findings of quixotic joy, incendiary light.
Happy launching, little book. Sail true. Like the lyrics of Giuseppe Verdi's heartbreaking chorus, that speaks of the lovely, lost homeland, of times gone by that are dear and irrecoverable, in these perilous times, "Fly, my thoughts, on wings of gold."
Contagious Magic can be ordered from Barnes and Noble, Amazon (on Kindle too), from Bookshop Santa Cruz, or from your favorite local bookstore.
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