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Posts Tagged ‘Redhawk Publications’

Be Filled – Shibori Blue

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 12, 2024| 12 Comments »

Poems and photography from Shibori Blue
by Beth Copeland
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Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance.   –   Yoko Ono
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Frost on the mountain.
Creeks freeze under skins of ice.
A broken window.
My neighbor’s chimes are silent.
Even the wind is frozen.
 . 
❦
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Spring passes and one remembers one’s innocence.   –   Yoko Ono
 . 
 . 
Does the mountain mourn
its lost children, bones buried
beneath sediment
and stone? Who gathered near its
peak? What family, what tribe?
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❦
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Summer passes and one remembers one’s exuberance.   –   Yoko Ono
 . 
 . 
Bridal veil mountain
in May, the month of weddings.
Fog, Mist, and white clouds.
Wild daisy fleabane bouquet
fresh in a blue Mason jar.
 . 
❦
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Autumn passes and one remembers one’s reverence.   –   Yoko Ono
 . 
 . 
Tiger-striped sunset
above the ridge in the west.
Trees with leaves and trees
without. What are we losing,
my love, and what will we keep?
 . 
❦
 . 
Poetry and photography by Beth Copeland
from Shibori Blue: Thirty-Six Views of The Peak, Redhawk Publications, The Catawba Valley Community College Press, Hickory NC; © 2024
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Beth Copeland lives in Ashe County, North Carolina, smack in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Each morning from her porch she sees The Peak, the highest mountain in Ashe County. It is solid and eternal – it is always shifting. Beth has recorded the mountain’s moods and contemplations with daily photographs, now pairing them in her new book with thirty-six poems that capture ephemera through the course of a year, moments of change through the changing seasons.
 . 
Thirty-six. A figure of truth and power. Product of two perfect squares. Multiplied by 2 to create the 72-season calendar established in 1685 by Japanese astronomer Shibukawa Shunkai. And again 36 the number of woodblock prints of Mount Fuji published by Katsushika Hokusai from 1830 to 1832. It is no coincidence that Beth chose thirty-six views of The Peak to inform her poems. She was born in Japan, the child of American missionaries, and has long revered the iconic mountain of her birth country, Fuji-san, whose profile The Peak of Ashe County so resembles.
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This book invites me to slow my breathing, pause in the busy race, contemplate each page: five simple lines of verse, the silent mountain drawing my gaze. Redhawk is gathering a family of uniquely creative poets, writers, and artists to stretch our imaginations and open us to new experiences of words and images. I will leave this sentence here at rest and return to another page of Shibori Blue. And another.
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❦
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More information about Shibori Blue: Thirty-Six Views of The Peak and the opportunity to purchase HERE
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Perseverance – Deep in winter do they dream of the music they will make, cicada song? Crescendo arpeggio decrescendo, easy combers across the long sea of summer. And does the creature measure the span of its days, egg to nymph, seasons in darkness, climb into light to mate and to die? Nothing can last, not even our song, yet we do not withhold our voices.
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Innocence – She is most beautiful when she does not know I am watching. She gives her animals life, little fox blanket, cupcake kitten, and they take from her all the fear and heartache that could have been trapped within to fester. Then she begins to sing.
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Exuberance – Utterly alien at once perfectly identifiable, the house wren fills its small kingdom with melody, rocketing in turn to each waypoint to pause, raise its minute cornet, FANFARE!, then swift to the next. I do not understand the words but I recognize the tune.
 . 
Reverence – What we have heard teaches us, reminds, suggests, niggles, promises, invites. What we have yet to hear offers to pull us into its presence. Listen. Be filled.
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IMG_6432
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Augury

Posted in ecology, Imagery, Photography, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 17, 2024| 9 Comments »

“Black Vulture” – Clayton Joe Young – http://www.joeyoungphoto.com

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[poems by Scott Owens, photos by Clayton Joe Young]
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Buzzard
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Always
when you look up
at white clouds, blue sky,
 . 
you see
that hyphen of a bird,
not flying but floating,
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silently
keeping two worlds
you imagine apart, together,
 . 
connecting
earth to sky,
life to death.
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Closer,
we see the hunched neck,
bald head, vulture stoop
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as something that gives us
chills.
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Scott Owens
from An Augury of Birds, forthcoming from Redhawk Publications; poems by Scott Owens, photography by Clayton Joe Young
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The naturalist Robert Lynd is quoted as saying, “In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.” How often do we actually pause and participate in silence? Become part of it? Sunday afternoon Linda and I had hiked a couple of miles along the Mountains-to-Sea Trail when we came face to face with friends we hadn’t seen since before COVID. They were hiking in from the opposite direction but our destination was the same: the Forest Bathing trail along Grassy Creek.
 . 
We continued on together. We outpaced noisier hikers; they turned back and left us in solitude. The thrum of voices at the winery and of pickups on Route 21 receded. We stopped – a gentle murmur of water flowing over the new beaver dam. Stopped again – breezes swishing through fresh Joe Pye Weed along the creek. As the trail led us up and away from the water, we left the laurel and holly and entered a glade of slender young tuliptree still recovering from logging. Our friend stopped us once more. She had taken off her sandals to feel the earth. Late afternoon sunlight streamed slant among the saplings and we were part of the silence. A vireo sang. She raised her arms and said, “This is what I came here for.”
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❦
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If we create silence, within us and around us, air and earth will magnify the silence with beauty. Birds will complete the silence with wing whirr and song. Here’s an invitation to silence, offered to us in the poems and photographs of An Augury of Birds. Scott Owens and Clayton Joe Young reward our held breath and contemplative approach with their avian celebration. They make these feathered creatures our companions – individual, distinctive, ripe with purpose. And Augury is such an apt title. Wasn’t Rachel Carson’s prophecy of a silent spring the spark that ignited our current fire of conservation and environmentalism? Noticing birds is a gateway to noticing the universe. Lift the latch, enter these pages, become part of these lives – If you close your eyes / you can hear the cosmos opening.
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“Northern Mockingbird” – Clayton Joe Young – http://www.joeyoungphoto.com

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All There Is to Say
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If it happens that you find yourself
at the front of a room full of people
listening to all you have to say
about what you think you know
and suddenly you hear
from an open window
you hadn’t even noticed was open
the voice of a mockingbird
as clear as the voice of God
singing in every language at once
you owe it to yourself
and all with the possibility of hearing
to stop in the almost silence
and say out loud, Listen
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Scott Owens
from An Augury of Birds, forthcoming from Redhawk Publications; poems by Scott Owens, photography by Clayton Joe Young
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Hiwassee
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Long fingers of catalpa trees,
Green globes of apples
Hang low over Licklog Road.
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White crowns of Queen Anne’s lace,
Orange umbels of butterfly weed
Fill a field where flycatchers
 . 
Dart from limb to grass
and back, consuming
Whatever rises. Swallows
 . 
Carve endless angles across
The tops of weeds let go.
Brown headed cowbirds
 . 
Follow white-faced cows
Near a lake surrounded
By mountains in a place
 . 
Where everyone waves
And everyone remembers
What it means to live.
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Scott Owens
from An Augury of Birds, forthcoming from Redhawk Publications; poems by Scott Owens, photography by Clayton Joe Young
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An Augury of Birds will be published by Redhawk Press in 2024. Check HERE for ordering information.
Scott Owens enlarges the community of creativity. He is professor of Poetry at Lenoir Rhyne University, former editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review and Southern Poetry Review, and he owns and operates Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse and Gallery where he coordinates innumerable readings and open mics, including POETRY HICKORY.
Clayton Joe Young is the Director and Senior Professor for the Photographic Technology Program at Catawba Valley Community College in Hickory, NC. He has won numerous awards for his photography and has published several books, including other collaborations with Scott Owens and with poet Tim Peeler, featuring rural North Carolina, especially Catawba County.
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“Chickadee” – Clayton Joe Young – http://www.joeyoungphoto.com

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All the Meaningful Noise
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How can you be on this earth
and not close your eyes on occasion
and listen to leaves give voice to wind,
hear the laugh of crow,
annunciation of blue jay,
moan of mourning dove,
all the meaningful noise
of another spring day?
 . 
Behind the finishing plant
just off the run-down road
between failing furniture towns,
a field is bursting with purple flowers.
If you close your eyes
you can hear the cosmos opening.
 . 
Scott Owens
from An Augury of Birds, forthcoming from Redhawk Publications; poems by Scott Owens, photography by Clayton Joe Young
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2020-06-11a Doughton Park Tree
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Wisp

Posted in family, Imagery, poetry, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 26, 2024| 12 Comments »

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[with 3 poems by Debra Kaufman]
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Walking Westerly, My Shadow Precedes Me
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She does not hear a warning
in the wren’s song,
+++++++++ as I do,
or see the ghost moon as an omen.
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She appears to have a jauntier step,
wilder hair, longer, slimmer limbs.
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Perhaps she is the me
I once was –
waitress, dancer, diary keeper.
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Nothing bad
has happened yet.
+++++++++ Soon
 . 
she will trail a dangerous
fragrance, be sniffed out,
tracked, pinned down.
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Wind trembles the beech leaves.
The wren calls again.
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I step toward the past,
she into the future
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Debra Kaufman
from Outwalking the Shadow, Redhawk Press, Hickory, NC; © 2023.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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If you believe that everything is connected;
if you believe that matter and energy are conserved (not to mention angular momentum);
if you believe that the breath you’ve just taken into your body, its oxygen reddening your corpuscles, worked its way up the hill from the great red oak not tumbled in last spring’s tornado, and that when you release it a second from now it will begin to wisp its way back down to wait for the asters you’ve sowed on wind-scoured earth;
if you believe that your body is stardust, its phosphorus and calcium and that fleck of selenium, every element which is heavier than air;
if you believe that no distance is too far and no time too long a thread to tie everything together and extend the connection,
++++++++++ then believe this:
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when that wisp of a woman sitting on the couch beside your father and his baby sister, white-haired tiny flit of a woman no more substance than moonbeam, when she smiles it will light up the string of a million smiles stretching back so far that every smile since must take its cue, all the way back to the very first smile twenty-five years (less thirteen days) before you were born.
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Recall those smiles you can and hold onto them — you dancing while she plays Mozart on the piano and laughs; she holding the cake while you take a deep breath to blow; beaches and playgrounds, jokes and canasta, weddings and first smiles of your own babies shared with her. Most smiles have flown to continue their cycle, petal of a flower she will notice, bug she’ll try to pick up from the carpet, a noise or a vision in some other creature’s thread of existence . . .
 . 
. . . but some precious few smiles are preserved in silver. Layers of atoms on glossy paper. Here’s one that her niece, your cousin, has just handed you, holding its connection to the others over seven decades in the bottom of a carton waiting for your gathering today. You hold it close for her to see and she smiles again.
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Look! Today’s smile! When you see it, recognize its provenance, its taxonomy, its lineage and inheritance from all that have preceded it. Accept its assurance. So much lost, so much consigned to this or that flimsy drawer in the cupboard of memory (yours) and so many keys to so many drawers misplaced (hers), but still firmly by that long and winding thread as tenuous as breath connected. Every wisp connected.
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The last time my mother
 . 
spoke words I heard
I saw her see me in a flash:
You’re my daughter!
We walked the hall,
a circumference
around the single rooms.
Round and round.
Each time we passed
the common room
she’d point to the Christmas lights.
 . 
On her bed lay a book
of her wedding photos.
I named the names, some small comfort.
I sang “Jacob’s Ladder”
and she smiled in that puzzled way.
 . 
I meant to rub lotion on her legs –
her skin dry, tissue-paper thin –
but they were calling her
for supper. I kissed her cheek.
She kissed my hand,
did not want to let it go.
 . 
I hoped we’d see a few sparrows
out her window, but
dark coming early, I saw only
our ghostly selves reflected there.
 . 
Debra Kaufman
from Outwalking the Shadow, Redhawk Press, Hickory, NC; © 2023.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Yet if we do not stare despair in its face
(I hear you say) how will we recognize
 . 
the silver sliver of moon
when it hangs suspended like a dream?
 . 
++++++++++ from Bearing / Witness
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Moonrise this past Monday was 2:37 PM in Elkin, North Carolina, USA. Waxing gibbous, we spot her on the one clear afternoon without rain. We won’t have to worry about finding our way through the darkened house at bedtime. Light will precede us, follow us, attend us. We can’t summon the moon or assign her course; we can only watch and trust she will return. We can only recognize and be grateful.
 . 
I didn’t want to get out of bed that Monday morning. All the motivations and machinations of the preceding week – phone calls, site visits, family conferences – had cooled and dissipated. Who says energy is conserved? I sat at my desk, the to-do list accruing and scrolling in my head, not knowing how to begin. And then there was Debra Kaufman’s new book waiting patiently at the top of the pile. I opened to the first poem. The clamp on my innards released and breath returned.
 .  . 
Moon, and of course shadow, are recurring images in Outwalking the Shadow. It is no coincidence that metaphor and metamorph are nearly homologues. Images may shift their shapes and meanings, may stand in for any number of times and spaces, but moon and shadow link arms, weave a net, cast it out and draw us in. Debra does more than create contrasts. Her poems are not satisfied to simply cast light into the dark umbra of grief. Enter her lines and welcome the shadow, relive it, discover how and who it has made you. Recognize that light blinds when it glares but enlightens when it glimmers, slivers, almost ephemeral as dream.
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Recognize that each of us lives with our shadow, and that even moonlight may cast one. Debra’s book is dedicated to her mother, Kathleen, and many of the poems explore her life, their life together, her final days, thereafter. Debra’s poems encompass much, much more than grieving, however. In many of her lines, I hear her speaking the very phrases I have needed to speak to my own heart. Perhaps you, too, have had mornings when you found it a burden to take even one step, when you felt empty and powerless and alone. These poems admit that. We are human and we carry our shadows. But these poems surprise themselves with sudden flashes and connections – a summoning of crows, a lesson learned, a visitation by spirits. Every time I turn another page, I discover more of what I need. Come, let us walk out together. There may still be joy if we open ourselves.
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❦
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More about Debra Kaufman, Outwalking the Shadow from Redhawk Press, and how to purchase HERE
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Let my heart swing open
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like French doors to a garden of blowsy flowers,
saloon doors where Kitty serves shots of rye,
a screen door with a farm wife waving you in,
 . 
or let my heart be a picture window
through which I see everyone I have ever loved,
my breath steaming the glass, come in,
 . 
we’ll turn up the party lights,
show all the passersby we’re dancing,
or better yet, let’s all spill out into the street,
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my heart a village music festival –
welcome teachers, firefighters, cashiers, nurses,
shysters and spinsters, salsa dancers a skateboarders,
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cat lovers, detasselers, twirlers and high-steppers,
come in you scuffed shoes, rhinestones, flannels,
I’ll be a mirror reflecting all y’all’s kindness,
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your clumsy moves and broken bits,
your sad patience and patient wildness,
your generosity, crankiness, haunted dreams –
 . 
I’ll be the hostess sprinkling blessings like petals,
saying, The universe is here and so are we – 
champagne for everyone!
 . 
Debra Kaufman
from Outwalking the Shadow, Redhawk Press, Hickory, NC; © 2023.
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2016-10-17a Doughton Park Tree

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