Books published by Shanti Arts LLC

It started with a personal commitment to sit an hour each week for a full year in the same spot in the woods. John Harvey's intention was to reconnect with nature and observe the flow of natural life through the four seasons. As Harvey settled into his weekly routine of visiting his "sit spot" and fully engaging his senses, rich and illuminating experiences began to unfold. His encounters with nature included seeing and listening to a plethora of birds, from tiny wrens to large hawks, from sweet-singing warblers to rattling woodpeckers; enjoying the sight of seasonal plants such as wild violets, trout lily, and skunk cabbage; sitting out in the open during weather events that ranged from glorious warm summer sunshine to an Alberta clipper in the winter; and spotting the occasional deer and even a black bear. In all cases, Harvey sought to observe, listen, appreciate, and learn. Learn he did-about the birds, animals, plants, and trees that surrounded and intrigued him. But his remarkable encounters with nature also facilitated self-discovery, fostered insight, and nurtured empathy and intuition.

Running throughout Wally Swist's numerous poems and publications is clear evidence of his lifelong dedication to observing the natural world. This practice in turn has influenced his extraordinary sense of perception and vision, so clearly at work in this collection, tested in all facets of life, from the most mundane ("Mall Walker") to the natural ("Ode to the Holyoke Range") to the political ("Ringmaster of the Ridiculous") to the eternal ("A Mystical Unfoldment"). Swist's powers of observation have led him to see the threads that connect all of it, and that is precisely the point . . . those threads are "The Map of Eternity" where we are "mesmerized with wonder" and "in awe of the wonder of what is."

First released in 1922, Hesse's classic novel Siddhartha has delighted and inspired generations of readers and seekers. In the sequel, Little Siddhartha, the search for meaning continues. Each one of us must follow a unique path toward wisdom. The constants, though, of love, forgiveness, family, and nature provide the enduring backdrop to the journey. Despite our differences, we can all see ourselves in the character of little Siddhartha, and we can hear the resounding Om that concludes this beautiful and timeless story of spiritual hunger and fulfillment.

Ann Copeland has lived a mountain of yesterdays as a teacher, fiction writer, vowed religious, wife, and mother. Throughout her rich and varied life, there has been one constant: Copeland's dedication to amateur music-making in its many forms - composing, playing, arranging, partnering, studying, and improvising - and in its many possible settings-alone or with others; in chapels, living rooms, and schools; in locations foreign and domestic, intimate and exposed; in mental states anxious, playful, and grieving. This collection of spirited and engaging essays tells the story of a lifelong student and devotee of music who, looking back, sees that "years of making music offered release, challenge, solace, collaboration, glimpses of possibility, a perishable entrance into felt mystery, and the chance to create a gift with and for others." With this book, Copeland is sharing that gift through the story of her life making music.

These poems, written in prose blocks, capture memories of growing up in the Inland Empire in California. Through looking back, as if through prisms, the speaker of these poems remembers pivotal experiences that occurred during her journey from child to adult. She searches for love, looking deeply into religion, marriage, romantic relationships, and friendships, and faces both barrenness and abundance, darkness and light, winter and summer, trauma and love. The speaker comes to find her identity through the symbol of the lemon tree, which ultimately becomes her personal tree of life.

With his fourth full-length poetry collection, James B. Nicola takes his readers out of the theater and into the museum, the gallery, the studio, the cathedral, the dance hall, and the cinema, traveling all over the world and all through time. With over eighty poems and sixty full-color images of the world's finest art, this carefully curated volume is an album of highlights from the history of art as well as a celebration of the artist's never-ending quest for both inspiration and immortality. Some poems pose questions as enigmatic and evocative as "Where does art/start?" while others spin the saga of the arts and artists through the ages. There is something for everyone: Botticelli and Bernini, Michelangelo and Monet, Pollock and Pygmalion, Renoir and Rodin, Astaire and Arbus, plus everything in between. A festive fusion of the verbal and the visual.

In her latest published collection of poetry, Tracy Ross confronts the problems and paradoxes inherent in communication. Broken Signals pays homage to the triumph of human meaning that comes through despite the tangled wires of daily disconnect brought on by the tethers of modern convenience.

Inland a few miles from the Pacific Ocean, at the confluence of two salmon spawning streams is a place called Cougar Creek. Stacie Smith first visited Cougar Creek in the fall of 1998, going alone, approaching the place at dusk, guided by simple directions to the cabin perched high above the narrow road: "Find the big, old maple tree by the parking spot, and look for the little wooden dolphin sign nailed to the tree trunk. The dolphin's nose points to the trail up to the cabin." She found the trail, and by the very last of the day's light, she found the cabin. Smith fell instantly in love with the place-its majesty, constancy, and healing energy. This collection of impassioned poems was born from that love.

A sequence of poems and prose questions, Dwelling: an ecopoem began as a conversation with Martin Heidegger’s essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” and became an expansive journey into the notion of home. With sharp focus, at once moving and lyric, Scott Edward Anderson explores the many facets of our dwelling on earth by drawing upon elements of nature, community, place, and love. Along the way, Anderson considers the impact of language, writing, displacement, and the city as ecosystem, ultimately concluding, “Home or the idea of home haunts us . . . we are always searching for it, for the way ‘back home.’ All we can do is try to make it, try to bring forth home as dwelling.”

Dedicated to blue-collar lifestyles and family secrets, Salt: Poems of Appalachian Roots pays homage to those born and raised in the Appalachia and to those familiar with the tribulations that come with poverty and failure. Combined with historic photographs by Lewis Hine, Doris Ulmann, Russell Lee, and others, this book exposes the depth and burden of personal and social struggles found among people in the Appalachia, but also offers a glimpse into their stalwart dedication to persevere.

This collection of just over sixty poems tells the story of the author's paternal grandmother, Sitala, who lived in Kerala, South India, in the early to middle twentieth century. A composer of songs, Sitala was known to use her art to negotiate her position as a woman, wife, and colonial subject. Though the author, Pramila Venkateswaran, knows little about the details of her grandmother's life and none of her songs were preserved, Venkateswaran interviewed older living relatives in Alleppey, Kerala, and listened to folk music that would have influenced her grandmother's songs in order to chronicle Sitala's life and art. As Meena Alexander observes, "Moving through the cycles of day and night, these poems evoke the arc of a woman's life, from the blossoming of young adulthood into the decay of old age." Venkateswaran creatively uses the rhythms of local musical forms such as kummi, kudiattam, naatu paadal (folk song) and vanchipaatu (boat song) to tell the stories about a woman living and growing old in India in the last century.

The Way of Haiku is a guide for learning to write the most popular form of Japanese poetry: haiku. But true to the inviting and personal style of its author, Naomi Beth Wakan, it is also an eye-opening view into the way that reading and writing haiku can change the way one looks at life. "Writing haiku helps you appreciate the wonder of ordinary things and ordinary days." Wakan discusses the history of haiku's development, its important literary elements, and the differences between haiku written in Japanese and those written in English. Numerous examples of haiku are provided, some written by Japanese haijin (haiku writers) and presented in translation, and some written by English-speaking writers. The rich explanation of the experience of writing haiku and the encouraging words of the author nurture readers in their own writing of haiku while remaining open to the possibilities it provides for personal growth. (Along with Poetry That Heals and The Way of Tanka, The Way of Haiku completes Naomi Beth Wakan's important and insightful Japanese poetry trilogy.)

Open is the story of a bright yellow umbrella that isn't fancy or high-tech. It does, though, have a wish. It wants to do what it was meant to do, and for that it must wait very patiently until the day comes when it can finally . . . open!

These poems by the award-winning writer Allan Johnston speak to the seeming contradiction that awakening to the outside world reveals aspects of our interior selves. As such, the poems in the collection initially speak from an intimate stance but move to a more broadly reflective one, while developing an increasing connectedness to the natural world. In a Window is a collection of work written over fifteen to twenty years; it is a kind of retrospective. In the end, the poems circle back toward the West, in that the sequence "Return" and the poems around it reflect time spent in the Sierra Nevada in California, the author's native state.