A Brave New Worldview

What songs can raise humanity out of the industrial materialism of our capitalist society into the spiritual and scientific enlightenment of an ecological, egalitarian worldview? What songs can ring our core with the fragile and heroic condition of the human being in a time of increasing global imbalance? This volume's 57 poems both sing and advance our spiritual and scientific sophistication in a way that calls to account both our hearts and minds to a more precise awareness of our human purpose, equality, vulnerability, and potential. Exploring love, politics and our connection to nature and to each other at many levels, each poem brings to life the beautiful synthesis of wisdom and mystery that are life's universal. This volume ends with "Tears for Amy," an elegy for a former classmate, Amy Biehl, a Fulbright scholar killed at the age of 26 while studying the transition to democracy in South Africa. A meditation on democracy, society, humanity, and the future for which Amy was working, "Tears for Amy" is 676 lines long, written in 26 26-line stanzas of terza rima, to mourn the young age at which Amy lost her life. The mission evoked in this volume's epigraph is that poetry is needed to advance, with music, image, eloquence and imagination, the brave new worldview for which our modern times are urgently calling. In fulfilling that mission, the poems in this volume will unite your heart's tenderest longing with the revolutions turning in the wider world. This is poetry that will engage us the way we need to engage with our time.