Publisher's Synopsis
This book is a kaleidoscope and travelogue of my life on the stony road towards art (lower case "a", always, for me, in the word art) - art as a form of learning and survival. One poem in this book, a poem about the part of my life I spent in Newport, Rhode Island, called To be somewhere, to say things about that place, expresses the sense of suspension between two worlds that I was trying to capture in the book's title (which is a line from another poem in the book, a poem about a dream I had about forgiveness). To be somewhere is just the highest swing of a pendulum, and to able to say anything about that place, about being there at that moment, comes in when the movement of the pendulum is suspended in air, right before it tries to swing back down and through equilibrium. The poems in this book have that sort of kinetic energy in them in different ways. Other parts of the traveling ideas in this work, metaphorical or literal, also come from my having grown up in a military family, the child of parents (including a father who served in combat in Vietnam) who each had a Dad in WWII--that family history infuses some of the work in this book, if not always directly via the subject matter. The cover of the book is a photograph I took of a doorway at the Georg Trakl House in Salzburg, Austria, in 2018. He was a lyric poet who died after being wounded in spirit by his experience in WWI, and when I saw the open doorway, it felt like an invitation. I snapped the picture, and forgot about it for a while, and then found it again at the right time.
