Between Wings

The author has been privileged to encounter and study with poets James Wright, John Logan, W.S. Merwin, John Unterecker, Galway Kinnell and others. The deeply personal lyrics in Between Wings, written over a period of 30 years, reflect those influences, as well as the author's reading of poets like Rilke, Plath, and the Deep Image poets. The shadow of a woman presides over the poems -- usually in the form of elegy or lament. Taken together, the poems enact the archetypal myth of separation and return in terms of the speaker's own history. They speak throughout from a perspective at the border between self and other, solitude and union, the darkness and the light -- seeking a state of transcendence-in-union glimpsed and longed for but always remaining just beyond realization -- "where the jewel of absolute darkness shines and shines / and all the masters of the light go blind."