 |
A Raga for George Harrison
by Sharmagne Leland-St. John
94 pages ~ 54 poems
Price: $16.00 US plus shipping
ISBN: 978-93-88125-90-1
Publisher: Cyberwit.net
Allahabad - 211011 (U.P.) India
http://www.cyberwit.net
Tel: +(91) 9415091004 +(91) (532) 2552257
E-mail: info@cyberwit.net
To order a personalised copy from the first 20 of 60, please order
directly from Sharmagne: email:ALittleHawk(at)aol.com
ABOUT THE BOOK:
A Raga for George Harrison tells stories in poems about the famous people who have
populated Ms. Leland-St. John's life through the last several decades. Sharmagne
was a guest in the Benedict Canyon home of the Beatles each night during their
first California tour in 1966. She later attended music school with George Harrison
at the Kinara Institute in Northern California.
Several subjects of her poems include Janis Joplin, Claudia Jennings, Hector Pieterson,
Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash, Richard Sylbert, Ron Talsky and others. She writes about poets,
too, who range from Beat poet Allen Ginsberg to Federico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda,
Sylvia Plath and lastly Virginia Woolf.
Additional poems filling out the collection include impressions gleaned from her travels
far and wide to exotic places such as Machu Picchu, Sri Lanka, Egypt and other far off
reaches of the planet.
A Raga for George Harrison was a finslist for The International Book Awards in the poetry division.
http://www.internationalbookawards.com/2021awardannouncement.html
ADVANCE PRAISE:
In her new book, A Raga for George Harrison, Sharmagne Leland-St. John
takes us on a world tour, from Cairo to Lima, London to Kashmir, Chicago to
Machu Picchu—and many other places around the globe. She is a cultural guide,
too, memorializing not only George Harrison but numerous other icons from the
60s and beyond, including Virginia Woolf, Janis Joplin, and Pablo Neruda. This
book gives us poignancy, as in "Things I Would Have Given to My Mother Had
She Asked"; nostalgia, as in "Hey, It Was the Sixties"; humor, as in "I Said Coffee";
and a voice crying out for justice, as in "Promised Land." In the tradition of the
confessional poets, Leland-St. John also speaks from her own places of vulnerability
as she writes about love and loss. I could almost hear my favorite country
stars strumming their guitars and singing the words of such pieces as "Wind Song."
You won't want to miss this rich collection of both free verse and formal poems.
—Wilda Morris, author of Pequod Poems: Gamming with Moby-Dick
Of the many reasons for losing oneself in a book of poems, one does not often
think about history. Sharmagne Leland-St. John's new collection, A Raga for
George Harrison, does exactly that for me. I was a high school senior in 1964 when
the British invasion swept across America, changing forever the pop-culture landscape.
In addition, singer, Janis Joplin, poet Allen Ginsberg and many others had already
made lasting impressions on how we think. Whether you read Raga as history or
not, Leland-St. John's superbly-crafted poems will remain with you long after you
place the collection back on the shelf.
—Michael Escoubas, author Monet in Poetry and Paint and Steve Henderson in Poetry and Paint
Author, Sharmagne Leland-St. John’s new book, A Raga for George Harrison, captures
the musicality and improvisation of a raga with words. A modern-day Scheherazade,
Leland-St. John colors the mind, and masterfully weaves a spell with her far-ranging
subjects. Her lyrics often made this reader want to sing. Perhaps, you too, will be
spellbound with the author’s range of tales. Highly recommended.
—Mary Jo Balistreri, author of Joy in the Morning, gathering the harvest, Best Brothers, and Still.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sharmagne Leland-St. John, 15-time Pushcart Prize nominee, is a Native American poet,
concert performer, lyricist, artist and filmmaker. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the
19-year-old literary and cultural arts journal Quill and Parchment.com.
Sharmagne spends time at home in the Hollywood Hills in California, her fly fishing
lodge on the Stillaguamish River in the Pacific Northwest, a casita/writer's retreat
in Taos, N.M. and her villa in Tuscany. She is the founder of fogdog poetry in
Arlington, WA and tours the United States, Canada and England as a performance poet.
She is widely anthologized, and her poetry and short stories appear as well in many
online literary journals. She has published 4 books of poetry: Unsung Songs (2003),
Silver Tears and Time (2005), Contingencies (2008), La Kalima (2010); and she co-
authored a book on film production design: Designing Movies: Portrait of a Holly
-wood Artist (Greenwood/Praeger 2006).
Sharmagne is editor of Cradle Songs: An Anthology of Poems on Motherhood, winner
of the 2013 International Book Award Honouring Excellence in Mainstream and Indepen-
dent Publishing and one of four finalists for the NIEA (National Independent Excell-
ence Award).
FROM THE BOOK:
I Said Coffee
by Sharmagne Leland-St.John
I said coffee
I didn't say,
"Would you
like to cup
my warm
soft breasts
in your
un-calloused,
long,
tapered,
ringless fingered
hands?"
I said coffee
I didn't say,
"Would you
like to
run your tongue
along my neck
just below
my left ear-lobe?"
I said coffee
I didn't say,
"Would you
like to
hold me
in your arms
and feel my heart
skip beats
as you press your
hard, lean body
up against mine
until I melt
into you
with desire?"
I said coffee
as we stood there
in the jasmine
scented night
my car door
like some modern day
bundling board
separating us,
protecting us
from ourselves
and lust
I said,
"Would you
like to go for
a cup of coffee?"
I didn't say,
"Would you
like to brush
your lips
across mine
as you move
silently
to bury your face
in my long, silky,
raven black hair?"
But you said,
"I can't
I'm married
I can't trust myself
to be alone
with you."
So I looked you
dead in the eye
and repeated
"I said coffee"
Pushcart Prize nomination (League of Laboring Poets ~ 2007)
Return to:
|
