Because the Light Will Not Forgive Me
Essays from a Poet
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
“Think of a man walking in the desert,” writes Griffin, “looking for the path to its summit, looking for the observatory that may, at last, shed light on what’s below.”
In this luminous and moving book of essays, award-winning author Shaun Griffin weaves together a poetic meditation on living meaningfully in this world. Anchored in the American West but reaching well beyond, he recounts his discoveries as a poet and devoted reader of poetry, a teacher of the disadvantaged, a friend of poets and artists, and a responsible member of the human family.
Always grounded in place, be it Nevada, South Africa, North Dakota, Spain, Zimbabwe, or Mexico, Griffin confronts the world with an openness that allows him to learn and grow from the people he meets. This is a meditation on how all of us can confront our own influences to achieve wholeness in our lives. Along with Griffin, readers will reflect on how they might respond to a homeless man walking through central Nevada, viewing the open desert as Thoreau might have viewed Walden, seeing the US-Mexico border as a region of lost identity, reconciling how poets who live west of the Hudson River find anonymity to be their laurel, and experiencing how writing poetry in prison becomes lifesaving.
Whether poets or places in the West or beyond, experiences with other cultures, or an acute awareness that poetry is the refuge of redress—all have influenced Griffin’s writing and thinking as a poet and activist in the Great Basin. The mindfulness of Because the Light Will Not Forgive Me demonstrates that even though the light does not forgive, it still reveals.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Griffin (This Is What the Desert Surrenders) ranges widely over topics from the nature of poetry to the beauty and challenges of the Great Basin's vast, expansive landscape in this reflective collection of previously published essays. Likening himself to Thoreau in the desert in one essay ("Walden Pond in the Desert"), Griffin discovers that his view of poetry is "rooted in engagement with the outside world, the one beyond my window." Pondering the attraction of the art form, Griffin declares that a "poem moves over things we cannot see, it precedes voice; it is silence presaging sound... In its plainest, undressed form, the poem is passion." He offers appreciations of poets, recalling his encounters with them and their impact on his own work. He notes that Carolyn Kizer, for example, had a devouring mind and read widely, and could be a fierce critic because she was always precise in her comments. At the center of the collection are two essays on Hayden Carruth, whose "literature encompassed the whole of his humanity" and whose "values brought forth a skepticism of the Modernist belief in poetry of the imagined world." Griffin's lyrical essays reveal the complexities and spirit of poets and poems.
