Books by Larsen Bowker

These poems sing the body's fierce desire to live forever and the mind's almost-sacred wonder that it was ever here at all. But free of what Whitman called the fear of knowing, they can hear the hum of time's seamless disappearance, riding the spinning tendrils of the mystery of silence that, like brief flowering seasons on high mountain meadows, try to make less seem more, for "surely there are men who've made their art out of no tragic war, lovers of life, impulsive men who look for happiness and sing when they've found it." They search for covenants of faith without borders, gods without omniscience, and unbloody sacraments that seek protection from nature's deadly indifference.

Many of these poems are about natural allies, the young and the old, searching for the eternal inside the ephemeral. They support and redeem each other whether at the beach or building trails on my part of a Blue Ridge mountain. In balletic delight, theyre day moons, unicorns, and boneless snakes, transcendent joy to his pursuit of the spiritual. They are the songs that cannot be memorized, tiny threads of freedom that alter the motion of the universe. In this playhouse of words, they offer an endless array of actors appearing as if by train emerging from a tunnel far across the valley the interplay of young and old, compelling as the smell of pine needles in hot noon heat of summer, clinging to my skin and clothes, claiming me the way the day claims the sky.