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The Bell and the Blackbird
by David Whyte
53 poems, 135 pages
Price $18.00
ISBN 978-1-932887-47-1
Publisher: Many Rivers Press
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018939048
To Order: www.amazon.com/Bell-Blackbird


ABOUT THE BOOK:


David Whyte’s latest collection, The Bell and the Blackbird, is a voice calling in the
wilderness of the heart. The voice is that of David Whyte, poet, philosopher and lecturer.
While his poetry provides immense enjoyment for those who love poetry for its own
sake, Whyte’s verse dwells in the enigmatic precincts of the soul. Without dogmatism or
condescension the poet invites his reader to walk with him through the dark night of the
soul. However, think again if you assume Whyte will let you remain there. For Whyte,
redemption is “Half a step/into/self-forgetting.” Emily Dickinson, in a famous line,
voices an important thrust to be found in reading David Whyte, “Instead of getting to
heaven at last, I’m going all along.”


GENERAL PRAISE ABOUT DAVID WHYTE’S WORK:


“David Whyte makes the reading of poetry a matter of life and death.”
—Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides.


“In North American, we spend more time at work than we do with our families or in our
places of worship or in the natural world. And so if we are not asking questions that are
germane to what is real in life, then we in very big trouble as individuals.” (Whyte said).
Boeing President Phil Condit said that he has yet to see an effective description of what
Whyte actually does. “Newspaper articles talk about David reading poetry to Boeing
executives,” Condit said. But David is much more of a storyteller, someone from outside
our system saying that there are other ways of looking at the way we do things. David
Whyte causes you to think.”
—Boeing Manager Magazine


“A dynamic speaker, Whyte doesn’t lecture but recites dozens of stories and poems,
including some of his own, to help bring to life the experience and emotion of change.
Whyte says such poems help managers and other employees to rethink their daily habits
and assumptions, thus stirring up some creative juices. One senior executive: “My first
reaction was: What a waste of time,” he says. I thought to myself, “What could a poet
possibly contribute?” But the executive now says that Whyte “helped us to think
differently than we ever had before. We had to look inside ourselves.”
—Business Week


Editor’s Note: The above material was provided by David Whyte and is under copyright
to Many Rivers Press. Used by permission.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


Internationally acclaimed poet David Whyte makes his home in the Pacific Northwest,
where rain and changeable skies remind him of the other, more distant homes from which
he comes: Yorkshire, Wales and Ireland. He travels and lectures throughout the world,
bringing his own and others’ poetry to large audiences.

He holds a degree in Marine Zoology, honorary degrees from Neumann College and
Royal Roads University and is an Associate Fellow of the Saïd Business School at the
University of Oxford. He is the author of nine volumes of poetry and four books
of prose, as well as a collection of audio recordings.


FROM THE BOOK:


Much Has Been Said
by David Whyte

Much has been said about the eternal
and untouchable nature of love,
its tidal ungovernable forces
and its emergence from far beyond
the ordinary, but love may find
its fullest, most imagined
and most courageous form
when it leaves the abstractions
and the untrammeled
to make its promises
amidst the fears, vulnerabilities,
and disappearances of our difficult,
touchable and time bound world.

To love and to witness love
in the face of possible loss
and to find the mystery of love’s
promise in the shadow of that loss,
in the shadow of the ordinary
and in the shadow of our own inevitable
disappearance may be where the eternal
source of all our origins stands
in awe of the full consequences
of everything it has set in motion.
 

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