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God's Cowlick
by Michael Feld Simon
98 pages 66 poems
Genre: Poetry
Price: $10.00
Publisher: Chickaree Publishing
ISBN: 979-8-3733-0207-4
To Order: Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Michael Feld Simon’s new collection God’s Cowlick features poems written during or about time spent in Pacific Northwest forests and coast line. The poems are like an invitation, a conversation between the poem and the reader. The language is sometimes colloquial, sometimes formal and sometimes invented.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
Michael Simon is a poet who surprises; his work is filled with unexpected metaphor: Foggy mornings are fewer, and the brief sock hop of an overcast afternoon lasts one song. … There's a language to a place to be learned by ear and foot. On a walk in the forest, he gives tribute to Whitman with: in this hypnosis of trunks, debauchery of green, euphoria of mist we have worldenough and time. Simon’s work is filled with his surroundings, which lie in the natural environment of his beloved Oregon, but always finding a connection to the world outside his own. Just as a cowlick sticks out, these poems present musings that stand out from normal, day-to-day thoughts.
–Judith MK Kaufman, Editor-in Chief, East on Central
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Michael Simon grew up in Assumption, Illinois and attended Western Illinois University, in Macomb. Now 70, until retiring several years ago, Michael taught English as a Second Language (ESL) and Adult Basic Education. Michael and his wife Janet, own 10 acres of forested hillside where they enjoy hiking, gardening and walking their dogs. A practitioner of Tai chi, Michael avers that “he has been learning to write poetry for many years.” He numbers as among his favorite poets, Han Shan, Wang Wei, Gary Snyder, Stephen Dunn and Sam Hamill.
FROM THE BOOK:
Low Tide Can Show Me Stars and Anemones
by Michael Feld Simon
In another round of turns and choices,
a fin-winged cormorant perched at rock’s edge
faces the gray morning Pacific, wings spread to dry.
Low tide is turning, in and out collide.
The reaching water is a crescent moon
white, shadowed, glowing.
Waves swallow the cormorant, the rocks,
the light and air, the morning; and receding,
the morning, the air and light, the rocks emerge.
The swallowed bird cuts the sheet of water
becoming a wave. Water swallows bird,
bird cuts water, water covers rock.
Though my salt is the salt of waves and tides,
I lack within me what would embrace basalt.
I cannot commune in the joyous surrender
of water’s patterns as a wave hurls itself:
thousands of wet, salty fingers spill into barnacles,
thousands flood crevices and bald rock.
The cupped palm of the surf applauds the worn
throat beneath the rock’s chin drowning
the pebbles lifted from the shelf.
Surging tides surrender water’s energy. Spray
kisses sky, rock again holds cormorant, wings spread
like a cutout figure, and water covers rock.
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