Title: A Love Letter to Darwin
B
y: ane Crown
Genre: Poetry, Trade Paper
Publisher: Lummox Press (PO Box 5301 San Pedro, CA 90733-5301) www.lummoxpress.com
Pages: 150
ISBN: 978-1-929878-21-5

USA Price: $15 + $3 Shipping
Canada-Mexico Price: $15 +$5 Shipping
WORLD Price: $15 + $10 Shipping
Publishing Date: August 20
10

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Jane Crown's poems express outbursts of honesty and truth, as the history of the heart can best define it. From the thready lashes of vision and passion, the game prize of the heart, the images try to reconcile and justify "the art of living".  Crown has come a long way from her first book. I am impressed!

Ann Menebroker

Throughout the book, Jane combines languages that evokes beauty, roughness, the personal, the ironic and the humorous. With keen observations, she "nimbly laces words together with her soft palate." and in my opinion, comes to the conclusion that though we lovers of men are haunted by them, they are worth it.  

 Diane Klammer

       On reading the manuscript by Jane Crown I was obliged to look at myself and some of the things I hold dear, to reinvent my own definitions. As a self-described Mystical-Anarchist the first thing I noticed was her title, A Love Letter to Darwin. This title poem is a fine piece of work and holds some themes that evolve and mutate, just like life. Within my own framework they resonate very well with the world as I have experienced it. By pop-psychology definition anarchism is connected with chaos, which is a vague concept to relate anarchism to, and relatively untrue if you’ve read the basic concepts of anarchy. Even if it were true mathematicians describe chaos as having order. It is randomness that is without order in modern physics and mathematics.

       Encapsulated in Crown’s work the theme of love, with all its chaos and in all its varieties and expressions, is the major thrust to this book. From personal and physical love, to the love of the human and animal spirit, she takes great joy in speaking what brings her to these ends.

Leonard J. Cirino (from the preface)

 

A few poems from the book

This House

  “The best proof of love is trust.” Joyce Brothers 

Your house; this heart

a place that has never been angry

a path to the door, always ajar

this hip holds nothing butterflies

imagine as petty on shelves or banisters

this cleft of ability to push out, hole up in

hold the cosmos back, smile; here within


your eyes finding my mouth, 

a plump daisy creased,

vanity doesn't live here anymore;

strewn among  plungers and 

orange peels.


you have uncovered every

counter in the whole of me

in the insanity of aging

I am yours; resilient, agile

cupping iced tea, darned socks;

the simple complications of a

house in your love.

 

 

Kissing

A strawberry pim

lips like an oval

this; where the heart ends up

 

My bed a silver willow

bending the moon from afar

stay here in the red blossom of my love

 

Your teeth chattering

against the green dust of

your past

 

A coy fruited core

standing in the way of

your shyness

 

Come lay beside the ocean

of my kisses

It is wide and floats

 

With butterflies committing

suicide in a rage.

 

 

A Love Letter to Darwin

 

"We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.''

Charles Darwin

 

1)

There was a great bass in his spine

telling him to move as a turtle does

not swift, but with purpose

it was small at first

an anagram for a compass

to move without water, within

under and about the back and limbs

flexing

 

2)

And life was work

a solid thing to feed

to make haste

there was a razor in his heart 

for splicing the code

to charm the fishes

find the path of muscle

 

3)

Within the buxom body

there was still not a name

but a thrum

a sinew, a marble

like a fistula in his gut

 

4)

Living said "eat,'' swam "breathe"

tattooing his fleshiness like  an ex-patriot, coming

out from behind his divine curtain

it gave him the reason for God

 

5)

Breathing spoke like a nun in vespers, 

like a Catholic

it held a salty berth, water and bone

cooperating beyond itself from the modus

but left itself to the device

a spring coiled like a 

secret in his mime

fins followed all the creatures then

 

6)

Banking like a sailboat

below, above, into

and beyond sea grass

there became a path

now traversing each sigh of reason 

 

7)

And here; finally, he stood

on his two pins; a manacle of 

instinct, erect now, walking 

his captive newborn earth

 

8)

This was thought, he sang

the praises of the past

as time repealed her pearl bell

and the creature dropped her

purple row into the

tumult of the life

given to spawn more

 

9)

Call him  man now, gallant

fleshly, corporeal, tall

from an abyss that can be named, this;

the legs of life 

will balance his spirit

see what and where he

lays his shadow in the sand

 

10)

He is clothed in memory

though he was never ours to hold

there is my letter to him, unfolding still

in my blood, in your pulse too

 

11)

Ungraciously divinity

has come to see him as madman

centuries still he shall reveal

his poesy to the turtles

finally shining reason against the bow

of all humanity.

 

 

 

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