Free-range verse distillations of quarter-century on the Arizona high desert. This volume's first section, "Window Rock," begins with a morning raven and ends with a Near Death Experience. The second section, "Tierra Zona," is a sequel to his poetry book Tierra Zia. The last section, "Shadows of a Lost Language," pulls out all the stops on our linguistic diapason. In the current lines we see reservation-ravaged Hopi ceremonially hearken back to their ancestral Pueblo People, erstwhile called the Anasazi. At the crossroads ...
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Free-range verse distillations of quarter-century on the Arizona high desert. This volume's first section, "Window Rock," begins with a morning raven and ends with a Near Death Experience. The second section, "Tierra Zona," is a sequel to his poetry book Tierra Zia. The last section, "Shadows of a Lost Language," pulls out all the stops on our linguistic diapason. In the current lines we see reservation-ravaged Hopi ceremonially hearken back to their ancestral Pueblo People, erstwhile called the Anasazi. At the crossroads of "land-and-life," multiple cultures commingle or collide among echoes of history and destiny. Canyons bleed light-year dreams of past lives. Ahead on the horizon, azure mesas conjure up Orion in the crystal bell of dawn. "Gary David's immersion in the Southwestern ethos and terrain is enviable. His poems after visiting Indian ruins are invested with a time-lapse quality as he toggles his imagination between prehistory and the present. Hearing him read his work in the '90s, I figured him as a 'language poet' influenced by the Beats (the poems as constructions in, and of, language itself, with meaning tied to sound/utterance.) Yet his poetry is too cerebral-yet-visceral, too intuitive, too adept, too well researched, to be just that; simply, his is the magical realism of poetry. The musicality of his verse insists it be read aloud: 'You clamber up the jumble/geologic ages scramble.' And his reading the poems aloud is incredibly flawless, even with tricky enunciations like 'tattered pattern' and the alliterative assonance of 'Squirrel scurries and/croaking crow wings.' A master of both the evocative image-'The hull of the moon/bobs in the waves like a gull/'-and language play with word-sounds as well as their conceptual associations, like 'armed jihad/and Armageddon.' Gary David also takes some amusing liberties with The Canon: 'blind faith-now the way. The truth and the light/echo like a storm's distant thunder....' We poets are told we should get a poem out of any research we do. And he does."-Susan Stevens, author of Things We Might Miss"Gary David gives us this other way of seeing, from the fragments the intimations of the whole, which, as we should know, is the real name for the holy."-Joe Napora, Small Press Review..".a strong western voice, steep with local and mythical mystic streams of thought."-Michael Elton Crye, Po'Flye..".a visionary and 'deep' work..."-Karl Kopp, The Bloomsbury Review..".crackles with energy..."-Keith Wilson, author of Graves Registry"Gary David emerges as a poet of uncommon precision and breadth, and as one who believes wholeheartedly in the promise of poetry's deepest orders to consecrate the individual soul beyond a bio-blasted circumstance."-Ralph La Charity, bardic performer, author of Litanies Said Handedly and other volumes..".rooted in place and history, giving us a view of our past and its influence on the present. This work promises to establish him as a major voice in Western writing." -Gary Holthaus, former Director of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, and author of Circling Back ..".it is my belief that an entire and powerful culture of unknown poets currently exists, whose work will ultimately need to be acclaimed if this nation is to continue to have a genuine, vital and useful poetry. Gary David is among those poets." -Dale Jacobson, author many volumes of poetry, including Exile in My Homeland
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