These searching and evocative poems ask what happens when symbols rooted in the natural world, which have traditionally helped to make sense of human life and offered initiation into experiences of the numinous, become devalued, corrupted and tenuous. How do we keep a sense of connection between earth, self, and culture when the physical roots of that culture are treated as disposable, or as commodities to be bought and sold -- or when profound symbolic material is undermined or made questionable by the legacy of recent history and changing social attitudes? The author explores these questions as they intersect with timeless themes of youth, ageing, death, transcendence, and love for people, history and place. This is not writing to leave on the page: it asks to be embodied, spoken, and explored with mind, tongue and breath.
About the Author :
Marcus James was born in Manchester in 1971. He has worked as a teacher, craftsman, musician and therapist. He currently lives and works in West Sussex.
Review :
Marcus James has gifted us with words that carry the thud of the human heartbeat and echoes of worlds beyond this one. His finely crafted and evocative poems are rooted in the here-and-now but always evoke the hinterland of what has gone before. The collection includes sequences that read like laments and shorter lyrics where the last line frequently astonishes. He conveys the mystery of the specific and rooted qualities of objects, time and space and by extension, re-enchants the reality of all of us. This is poetry that ripples outwards and catches us emotionally and intellectually -- its depths are mysterious and its surface, sparkling with light.
--Victoria Field
This haunting poetry aims at finding the mythic moment when human and world embrace and create each other, and something else shines through. Reading the poems, forming their words in our minds and mouths, we see and taste that 'something else, ' and remember it in our souls and our bodies. Fleetingly, it is intimately present once more. These are love songs in the fullest sense of the word, full of yearning, circumspect and sad, for the sensuous and spiritual presence otherwise outlawed by tepid IT dreams and peddlers of the phoney or the merely factual, who threaten to drain us and the world of meaning and delight. They deserve to be read as widely as possible.
--Simon Wilson
Defiantly out of fashion, these finely cadenced poems sing out of our present darkness. A vital act of personal witnessing, they express our current sense of alienation and yet at the same time evoke the redemptive power of the numinous often lying just below the surface.
-- Peter Abbs
