On the Chinese Wall - New & Selected Poems 1966 — 2018

On the Chinese Wall by Roger Dunsmore

Foreward by Stephen Osborne
Introduction by Rick Newby


Advance praise for On The Chinese Wall:

Roger Dunsmore invokes Gary Snyder and Lewis Thomas as epigraphs to this impressive and wide-ranging collection, but they aren't the only guiding spirits: Lucille Clifton, Ikkyu, Lao Tzu, Werner Herzog, Eckhart, and various 'everyday folks' from a variety of walks of life—as well as a menagerie of animal spirits—also inhabit and inform these poems. Although the poems speak from a sensibility ethically inhabiting and in loving relation with peoples and creatures from the entire planet, Montana is the hearth around which Dunsmore's poems come into being— sometimes like slowly unfolding stories around a slow-burning fire (with that yarn-spinning talent of mastery), sopmetimes like lyrical bursts and fever (with a powerful emotional core), sometimes like softly spoken observations that nudge a reader toward a more deliberate inhabitation of the world. Dunsmore writes,

  At the porch
  I wipe ice from the blade
  with worn out jeans.
  The stove is cold,
  and two horses in a lower field
  lean against the dark.

And in some ways, that's what these poems do: they give us a glimpse into a body of work from an artist who has leaned against the dark, shown us the extent of our endurance. These are poems from a life lived carefully, lived within and for the art.

—Tod Marshall, Gonzaga Professor and former Washington State Poet Laureate



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On the Chinese Wall by Roger Dunsmore


On the chinese wall - back cover