Brand New: Ancient Lights

Better than a May-basket full of daffodils: today I'm delighted to announce the publication of Dick Jones' Ancient Lights, the latest title from my micropress, Phoenicia Publishing. His first full-length collection of poems is being released today in a gorgeous hardcover edition, a standard paperback, and as an e-book.

Dick is an old friend at The Cassandra Pages -- we met online a number of years ago through our blogs (his is Dick Jones Patteran Pages), and in person for the first time this past fall when J. and I were in London. We quaffed a few pints together at a neighborhood pub, along with several other blogger friends, talking of warm beer, mushy peas, and,of course, books. Dick is a wonderful person, gifted musician, and a brilliant poet whose work has spoken to me and touched me deeply over all the years I've known and read him. It seemed like a great literary omission that his work hadn't yet been gathered into a printed collection. I'm proud to have been his editor, designer and publisher for Ancient Lights, and hope it will mean that his poetry is available to a wider audience, and has a greater assurance of posterity.

In his poems, Dick writes of life and relationships, deeply felt but never sentimental, in strongly-crafted English that proceeds from the tradition of Eliot, Thomas, and Heaney, but is very much his own: restrained but filled with truth, sharp observation, memory, and emotion; never showy or deliberately clever. He is a poet who gets close to the truth as I feel it myself, and so the words feel personal, and timeless, whether he is writing of his boyhood just after WWII, his loves, his travels, his children, the deaths of his parents, or his own mortality.

I hope you'll agree, and consider buying one of these editions for yourself or a friend -- you'll be supporting independent publishing and art as well, since we return a large portion of the profits to the authors. Please take a look at the book description over at the Phoenicia site... if you aren't familiar with Dick's work, you can read a selection and hear the poems read by the author at qarrtsiluni, where Dave Bonta and I nominated Dick for a Pushcart Prize in 2010, for this poem:

 

SEA OF STARS

They will require,
should I return,
that I give name
to all the things I saw.

Even as I feed back
voltage, trickle chemistry
past their electrodes;
even as I share

my heartbeat with their monitors,
my blood with their microscopes,
they will question
in quiet voices,

seeking out new nouns
with which to corner
the ineffable, new verbs
to charge the immaterial.

As now their aerial voices —
filtered through ionosphere,
the shingle-clouds of asteroids,
across these tideless oceans —

whisper insubstantial, needle-thin,
scratching their need to know
the unknowable onto the mighty
silence. I trail interrogation

like a shower of sparks.
But from this eminence
I no longer heed
their eyes that scrutinize,

lidless, unswerving. This dark
accomodates a billion eyes, speculating
my parabola by day, by night, probing
for my tiny skidding light.

Implacable, incurious, I navigate
the brilliant wastes — long black
sargassos drifting, planet wrack
and flotsam, dereliction.

And beyond, always beyond,
the bright flying splinters of the stars.

--Dick Jones

 

 

Comments

[Dick]

Thanks so much, Beth, for all the support and hard work. I'm very proud to be part of the small but perfectly formed poetic community on Phoenicia Publishing.

[Marja-Leena]

This looks and sounds lovely! Congratulations on all the hard work to you both, Dick and Beth.

[Lucy]

Ordered!

[john]

Ordered as well.I think i have mentioned before that independent publishers of the printed word and independent booksellers are heroes of our age.

[Beth]

Thank you all so much!

[Natalie]

Standing ovation for Beth and Dick - truly a perfect collaboration. Can't wait to see the result, am going to order now.

[Hattie]

So nice! Did you know about the poetry teach-in at Occupy Wall Street?

[Elizabeth "Beth" Westmark]

I planned to order the Kindle version so I could have it immediately, but upon seeing the limited-edition hardback, there was no turning back. It's ordered.