Böcker av Larsen Bowker

Larsen Bowker's three Chapbooks and seven books of poetry, take images and metaphors come from a childhood in a small Prairie town in Nebraska with more trees, hills and rivers than massive fields of grain, and found his narrative style growing up in resilient synchronicity of his parents' polar opposite personalities-physical vigor of his Father's inventive silence and his Mother's lubricious loquacity, making it easy for him to believe all lives grow out of myths and physical images shaping who we are and seek to become.Both athlete and poet, he believes Faith in Body, Mind and Soul forms the character best-suited to avoid discipleship to one of the three...while "our best chance to connect all three to who we are and what we want to become is that elusive, mystical, charismatic state of being we can never quite define, but know for sure when they are in synch, as if they were as distinct as the line of our nose in three way mirrors, or the memory of our first kiss."

BRANCHES WITH GREEN LEAVES My seven year old grandson believes it's important work to help repair trails I've built through rock-strewn mountain property, even asking if we can build new ones to new placesandhe believes me when I tell him to hang onto branches with green leaves when he edges down a steep bank to the stream, and his eyes grow big when I tell him about the bones I found in the hollow where deer come down to drink, and when the trail back to the house gets steep, he puts his hand in mine and I know I'm safe for a little while. for Sam

These poems sing the body's fierce desire to live forever and the mind's almost-sacred wonder that it was ever here at all. But free of what Whitman called the fear of knowing, they can hear the hum of time's seamless disappearance, riding the spinning tendrils of the mystery of silence that, like brief flowering seasons on high mountain meadows, try to make less seem more, for "surely there are men who've made their art out of no tragic war, lovers of life, impulsive men who look for happiness and sing when they've found it." They search for covenants of faith without borders, gods without omniscience, and unbloody sacraments that seek protection from nature's deadly indifference.

Many of these poems are about natural allies, the young and the old, searching for the eternal inside the ephemeral. They support and redeem each other whether at the beach or building trails on my part of a Blue Ridge mountain. In balletic delight, theyre day moons, unicorns, and boneless snakes, transcendent joy to his pursuit of the spiritual. They are the songs that cannot be memorized, tiny threads of freedom that alter the motion of the universe. In this playhouse of words, they offer an endless array of actors appearing as if by train emerging from a tunnel far across the valley the interplay of young and old, compelling as the smell of pine needles in hot noon heat of summer, clinging to my skin and clothes, claiming me the way the day claims the sky.