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    Coming to My Senses
    Coming to My Senses
    Coming to My Senses
    Ebook102 pages42 minutes

    Coming to My Senses

    By James P Kain

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    Book Description

    Coming to My Senses is a collection of old and new poems written over many years in many places. So it is a kind of anthology of my works to date.

    In putting it together I looked for common elements in order to group the poems, and found five directions that the poems take: Seeking Passage is about moving through changes in life, looking forward or backward and recognizing the need for change. Of Love and Loss is self explanatory poems responding to the heartache of love and memories gone. Diversions & Reflections are poems of response to the moment, creative outbursts responding to the moment. alludes to the sources of ideas and inspiration, and includes poems exploring the poets role and identity. Coming to my Senses is about finding my place in the here and now through the poetic experience. It is the summing up of my understanding that poetry is not an escape, a frill or a crutch, but a discovery of a deeper reality through giving attention to the sense of the moment.

    In The Preface I comment: Writing poems for me has always been an experiment, an extension of awareness, a searching into the internal life of emotion and thought. It has been a practice in reawakening the language by seeking novel ways to put words together, not just for the game of wordplay, but to refocus the mind by bringing attention to the words themselves and the things they point to to see them strangely new, to hear them create music through their rhythm and sound. To gently shake the reader awake, to see in front of them an image perhaps from a dream that may not make much sense, but there it is, in wonder and artistry. There is something still marvelous and meaningful in the world even in its uncertain and elusive presence; if this is not the stuff of poetry, I dont know what is.

    Poetry, for me then, is a search and a celebration, a revelation, not an explanation or a comment on the world, but rather a discovery of the inner life of thought and consciousness a coming to my senses and a reawakening of something with reverence.

    The poetic moment is a moment that begins and ends in the minds silence, and within that silence is a wide world of timeless utterances, subtle responses and the feeding roots of new ideas. The poetic moment is what ties philosophy to the real world, what demands religion from the questing soul, and what unveils the deeper values in an otherwise common and habitual world.

    These poems are records of some of these moments. They are meditations and reflections more than they are compositions. The form each poem takes arises from the moment that still point of the turning world from the attempt to dissolve the outer consciousness and reach a pure state of cognition, the origin of the question: What is it in this life that seeks for something more? There is something wistful in each attempt to find an answer, and though the answer is in the end a mystery we must not forget that moment of illumination in which we first discovered that mystery gives birth to imagination who, like a child, gleams at every new thing.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherXlibris US
    Release dateOct 8, 2008
    ISBN9781469101705
    Coming to My Senses
    Author

    James P Kain

    James P. Kain teaches English and creative writing at Neumann University in Aston, PA. He is the author of three collections of poetry and one novella, and hes had his writing published in numerous regional and national publications. He lives in Glen Riddle, PA with his wife, Helen, and daughter, Cara.

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      Book preview

      Coming to My Senses - James P Kain

      Copyright © 2008 by James P. Kain.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any

      form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

      or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing

      from the copyright owner.

      This book was printed in the United States of America.

      To order additional copies of this book, contact:

      Xlibris Corporation

      1-888-795-4274

      www.Xlibris.com

      [email protected]

      52685

      Contents

      Preface

      Part I

      Crossing Bridges

      The Holy Path

      Walk the Dark Night

      The Irish Dancer

      The Irish Fiddle

      Don’t Hide from Spring

      On Metaphysics

      Tryptich

      Curved Space & the More Delicate Times

      Fading Pictures

      Part II

      In Your Absence

      A poem a dream a song and you

      Upon realizing that I’d never see you again

      Dark Mirror

      To Love Again

      Images of Leaving

      To______ whose letter never came

      The Second Loss

      Don’t Think of Love

      New Leaves from Old Stems

      Marriage (for Joanne & Doug)

      Part III

      Night Wisdom

      There is some bird

      Water & Rock

      In Moving the Ivy

      Three Friends

      Bloodroot

      One False Eye

      Dreamscape

      Graffiti at Twilight on Saint Agnes Church

      I Pray

      Another Prayer

      Time steals pride

      Without Grace

      Quartet

      Part IV

      Borges Died

      The Circle of Dark

      Puntiglio (A Triad for Vladimir Nabokov)

      Dark Fugue: the Poet’s Song

      Oracle

      Poetry is

      The Painter

      Pen and Paper

      Finding Poems (after Annie Dillard)

      Part V

      Something in the Air

      Fish

      While Staying at my Neighbor’s House

      I Eat Time

      Of the Same Root

      Soul Sleepers

      Cryptogram

      Into the Fire

      Stones

      Water

      North Wind

      Do I Wake or Sleep

      Prayer

      Dedication

      To Helen & Ciara

      Preface

      I

      Sometimes at evening there’s a face

      that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.

      Art must be that sort of mirror,

      disclosing to each of us his face.

      (from The Art of Poetry by Jorge Luis Borges)

      Poetry reflects the face of the poet like a reflection on water. Yes, there is an image wavering on the surface but behind and below that image is something deeper. I’ve always been fascinated by the depths and have allowed the poems to rise up to the surface. I don’t always know what they mean, but I let the words flow like the message of some mirrored soul trying to speak to me.

      How do you expect anyone to understand you? A close friend, Dave, asked me this after my reading of a new poem to him one night. I was strangely pleased by his reaction; I don’t remember what I told him, but I can still remember my internal response—that it was okay and somehow satisfying for the poem to be puzzling, to make someone wonder: what was that about? But I was also aware of the difficulty for him or a reader. Shouldn’t poetry make sense?

      I never forgot that incident, because it posed a problem at the core of my understanding of poetry. What is poetry meant to do? Should it be transparent in its intentions? Should it tell a story or have a clear sense of place, time and situation? Should a poem rhyme, follow a metrical pattern, use a traditional form? These are questions for all poets, and I’ve learnedthere are a wide range of answers. You’ll find poetry and poets of all types if you look. And there are opinions about what’s right and what’s wrong with every type, every choice. After nearly 40 years of writing, reading and teaching poetry I am no closer to an answer than I was that day. Though there are definitions, theories, opinions and schools of thought on what poetry is and should be, there is little

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