Böcker av Geoff Peterson

The Book of Leaving feels that way. Like a bag is packed and the engine's running. Only this time, the guy is old and he's got to do it place. In situ, as it were. Call it a hard-nosed meditation with coffee and bathroom breaks. It's good to rejoice at such tender small things as your own life.

A Late OfferingBut today is different.I recognize I can't go ondoing this alone.Today he will need God. That's the man on his knees, praying to something or someone as vast as the dark and as quiet as the heat coming on. It's what's left when time fades to a stop, and words have all fallen from the trees. ______________________________Reader Comments:Peterson's new offering, The Directions to Blue Willow, is a compelling, powerful, and at times exquisite testament to the life of the spirit. Each poem is precisely at the heart of a man searching his soul for a way home.-Sharon Butler, l'aluna di AbrilThe poems in Peterson's latest are among the man's best. Here he returns to a recurring theme: At what point am I acceptable before God? But now as he ages, the poems are lean and simple, and the search made clear.-Andy Vinca,poet-proprietor, Poets' WarehouseI can't shake the image of Masaccio's fresco of the Holy Trinity. At the base a skeleton lies upon a sarcophagus beneath the inscription: I was what you are, and what I am you shall become."Every book is a confession," says the poet, and we the priests ready to offer absolution or exact an appropriate penance. But soon we note that each poem is a bead on the rosary of his life, and there has been penance aplenty. Perhaps the birds that visit carry the desired pardon, or his trips to Blue Willow may provide moments of peace. With each offering he extends his naked hand and we are left to wonder who will answer. -Barbara D. Crone, artist & poet

Handmade Stories"e;After fifty years of living in these pieces, I can better get a grip on my psychosis,"e; says the author of 5 O'clock Shadow. Honed and smoothed to the bone, these tales bear the balm and bruises of a man's life, abstracted. Drunkalogues, short pieces from the mouths of recovering drunks that remember how it was. "e;The point is, drunkalogues are not merely deviational episodes to be logged as down time, but are valuable dramas that contain the blueprint of our lives."e;"e;I'm reticent to publish for fear I'll fall over a railing to the mezzanine and land in a dumpster of store-bought roses, thorns intact."e;Which is just another drunkalogue that didn't make the cut. It takes place in Las Vegas in a lot outside the Review-Journal: a story that begins with a Greyhound bus and ends with same. "e;Some things don't change,"e; says Peterson, "e;like real life and the stories that seek comfort in it."e;

A man drives a car from one tattered corner of the nation to another in the year of COVID. Passing from winter flurries to the wide angled West, over landscapes both shuttered and moribund, driving becomes a trance where the odometer flips over and time is the length of a song on radio. In In the Underground Garage, the poet describes not geographical states so much as the state of being in transit, where solitude slips into silence and you learn that the road is driving you.

A man drives a thousand miles and lands in Mesquite, a desert town northeast of Vegas and tucked along a mountain corridor with Utah. He gets a room at a motel and prepares to look for an old friend. Woodrow by name, whereabouts unknown. But a deep inertia takes over and the best he can do is watch cable news and log entries in a journal called "Alone, with groceries," which is what he is, just sitting, waiting, and using the toilet. It's strange to be old and aimless, and lost without the company of a friend. Life is good when it's all in the past and soon forgotten.

Always read a book of poems back to front so that the wave rolls backward… Now apply the same method to your whole life.In Death Work the poet does just that. By rewinding fragments from memory, he bears witness to attachment and its eventual unraveling. This is the point where the sheer weight of a man's past opens his heart to the mystery. The Japanese have a word for it: jisei, death poems that express a sudden alertness to the fact of this world and the emergence of another. Death Work tracks one man's descent into clarity, a decompression chamber linking life and death. "Thought is a staircase," he writes, then erases it.

Archipelago is a vision of the historical past in collision with the future. First glimpsed in a dream over forty years ago, the poet traces the evolution of the underlying myth in poems over the course of one life.

And now we come to Trance States, the twenty-third book listed under Petersons Literature of Missing Persons: Would anyone care to begin? If not, let me say its not often we encounter such a flat-footed character as the ghost lurking in the halls of this book. I cannot, in all good conscience, call it poetry, nor recommend it. We return it to its author with the suggestion that he relax his obsession with the mysterious Margot of his imagination.Geoff Peterson