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Unavoidable … evade dying at your own peril
by Marcel Aimé Duclos
60 poems ~ 103 pages
Price: $14.95
Publisher: Black Forest Publishing
ISBN: 9798521186686
To Order: Amazon.com
ABOUT THE BOOK:
This book of poems presents an elderly man’s interior journey during the extended year of Covid-19. Living with a life-ending diagnosis, he faces the unavoidable in a poetry that does not shun the real. With seriousness and humor, he writes in the poem El Paso County, that it is “better to die / of what ails me / than to take on / another passenger / thumbing for a ride”.
In the closing poem, Buttonbush, the poet alludes to perennial wisdom when he voices, without any sentimentality: “You reach for me / with your thousand arms / will not let me escape / you needle-touch me / awaken me / anchor me in your blinding light”. The poet speaks to the shared humanity of all spiritual traditions.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
In this remarkable volume, the poet faces the mysteries and quandaries of aging and eventual death from a terminal illness with a steady, and unflinching but questioning hand (“that womb-like nothingness waiting for the seed”). With theological undercurrents (prayer surely swings my hammock”), he weaves through Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Native American spirituality and more, along with a plain hobby-farmer wisdom and a deeply perceptive embodiment of the natural world (“I walk the upper pasture / milk weeds bent for winter”). Attention is paid here to sociological and political concerns, all of them expressed with sympathetic, meticulous use of language.
–Judy Clarence, multi-published poet including Quill and Parchment
Marcel Aimé Duclos’s newest book of poetry Unavoidable … evade dying at your own peril is a heart-rending selection of what could be called farewell poems. Marcel explores his past, his present, and his possible future admission into the end-of-life mystery. His poems give the reader a sense that he has found comfort at the end of a life filled with events both joyous and lamented as full of twists and turns as in a maze.
–Vaugh Neeld, multi-published poet including Poetry Society of Colorado’s Showboat, Quill and Parchment, and The Avocet
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marcel Aimé Duclos is a former professor of psychology and philosophy, a practicing theologian and depth psychotherapist, a published author and poet. Without any doubt, he walks the labyrinth given to us all. He still seeks the still point as an unfinished sentient.
FROM THE BOOK:
Chasing a Ghazal
by Marcel Aimé Duclos
white linen paper gathers
ink of softer colors
new words I speak of late
voice songs that wake my mate
return to years of hope
avoid false fear we cope
why not maintain again
I pray refrain Amen
new life does birth in spring
enjoys what life does bring
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