Books published by Skysill Press

In The Broken Flower poet Jeffery Beam journeys beyond merely human stories into the radiant IS - the I AM hidden in earthly shadows and gleaming foliage and skies. Poems written over several decades coalesce "not just to say / this or / that / But ... to say / what is between." In their "words' melancholic / swarm" Beam finds human feeling in Nature's broad manifest, a world ripe with anniversaries - of the bobwhite, the copperhead, owls, tree frogs, deer, apples and persimmons, mountain fogs and river rhythms, Monet, Cathar spirits, Paracelsus, Lazarus, and falling stones - affirming that "there is a reason for being here / ... however / it insinuates itself into you." The Broken Flower, Emersonian in its scope and wisdom, seeks not the perfect, but the infinite in the quotidian, the "unrestrainable / heart" within "the last place we would think /to look // ... in the discarded shattered world," where the stem-less flower proves to be "the most perfect flower" because it is broken. These poems fulfill William Carlos Williams' maxim of writing for "the pursuit of beauty, and the husk that remains." The Broken Flower is a work, in which the awkward, the broken, and the common welcome the reader with verity, wholeness, and grace.

Alchemical polyphonia of non sequitur. Massa confusa of the digital age spied through the alembic of books. Relentless machinery of revelation. An eschatology of the species, of the biosphere. Chance operations and elegant lyrical surrealism. Vermicelli five bushels hashish vowel. It's all here in The Sixth Great Extinction. In his poetry, Whit Griffin makes living forms. He's doing it to keep the tradition alive. -Peter O'Leary

'If the Tao and the Farmers' Almanac produced an offspring', notes Lisa Jarnot, 'it would be Whit Griffin's Pentateuch.' 'A new poet versed in the old lore', Whit Griffin's poems perform an alchemy of word and world: 'Riddle, oracle, proverb, divination, the poems remind us of so much we have forgotten and so much we never knew. It's as if the words were written back before the world began and or were found just after the world had ended - captured now within the pages of a book that has apparently been lost for centuries - opened here in your hand: an almanac of ancient rhymes' (John Phillips). 'From historical references to chance remembrances of bits from many other sources, to what the poet has invented. There are smiles, outright laughter and far deeper wisdom' (Theodore Enslin).