James Mcgrath

The Sun is a Wandering Hunter

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

This collection is born from James McGrath's decades-long friendship with the Hopi and particularly with his collaborator, the artist Otellie Loloma. Rather than a memoir or narrative detailing external events, these poems are an inner testimony, enacted through rhythmic lyrics that lead us to a mythic place, a world redolent with meaning. These poems, then, are really songs, songs emerging from a primordial source. McGrath holds close to that source, achieving a timeless wholeness, a kind of ritual purification through language. Mimetic of the sacred, McGrath's poems or songs begin to dance. The page becomes a dancing place, a plaza where gesture, image and sound meld to convey a reality as fresh as it is ancient. James McGrath lives in an old adobe house in the traditional village of La Cieneguilla, Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is known for his narrative poetry in the KAET/PBS American Indian Artist Series of the 1970s. James was creative writing instructor and the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe in the early 1960s and spent twenty years teaching and as Arts and Humanities Coordinator for the Department of Defense Overseas Schools in Europe and the Far East. He was Poet-artist in Residence with the US Information Service, Arts America, in Yemen, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the Republic of Congo in the 1990s. His collections of poetry, At the Edgelessness of Light, Speaking with Magpies, Dreaming Invisible Voices, and Valentines and Forgeries are all published by Sunstone Press.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Sunstone Press
• Seitenzahl: 98
• Erscheinungstermin: 12. November 2014
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 6mm
• Gewicht: 156g
• ISBN-13: 9781632930330
• ISBN-10: 1632930331
• Artikelnr.: 41670512

Autorenporträt

I would consider myself to have led a life mapped out with an inevitable outcome of disappointment and failure, that although having the dreams and aspirations of any individual starting off in life. My path was seemingly written on the adoption of my surname, as it had been by my mother on the day that she married my father. My childhood would have been my honeymoon period of a rosy view of possibilities in life, that would have reflected the joy and love that had been bestowed upon myself and my siblings within a loving home, headed by two parents that dedicated their very existence to the children that they created, Demonstrated by the sacrifice that they made in the pursuit of the happiness of each and every one of them, whilst being rewarded with nothing but sorrow and pain. This vision of a future that had been an idealistic road map to be repeated by myself, of happiness in a replication of what I had experienced as normality during my upbringing. Being married and being a parent, comparable to what I and my siblings took as what every home experienced very naively as standard procedure up and down the land, but was never to be, as life's rug was slowly pulled from underneath my feet, partly my own blame, but also by the cards dealt to me in life, in my fickle expectations of repeating my upbringing in a stable relationship of the past that no longer exists, to be experienced by my own children, only to find 'commitment' as being a word forgotten. The pain of rejection from the investments made without return upon relationship failures, only removes any further ability to improve life's outcomes. This has brought only pessimism and mistrust that led to a spiral of drug abuse and depression, and has brought me to this point in my life. I still hold on to the humour gifted to us by our parents that we all share and still binds us, and helps us to continue with whatever this existence throws at us next. But I shall march on and attempt to improve, and to be a parent and grandparent one day, hopefully to be dealt an ace from the pack and no longer the joker.