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poetry by Diane Lee Moomey
At times, this poet is all knees and elbows with her world. At other times, she merges seamlessly with its hills and valleys. In this collection of poems, written over the past ten years, Diane reflects on the interface between "self" and "other".
2015
by Robbie Sugg
Like a bard just setting-out, Sugg is comfortable being transformed by the land around him, choosing the Greater San Francisco Bay Area’s Mount Diablo for both ascent and descent – a natural monolith from an era before humans -- the space that allowed his language to grow and prosper. As such, he appears well-anchored in ‘place,’ drawn to it naturally.
Neeli Cherkovski, author of Whitman's Wild Children, and volumes of poetry
my spine is a fault zone
my hair is manzanita
my lungs are oak
my heart
is a grassland.
2014
Close to Home: haiku and other poems
by David E. LeCount
In one stone or turtle shell, one feels a passion to live forever and a recognition that it cannot happen. In the leaning of a favorite willow tree is the love of beauty and ugliness that cannot be separated, and that cannot be owned. So it is that what we love and hate is terminal and eternal. Out of all poetry comes the longing for what we can never have, and never lose. The holding on and the letting go.
The poems that follow attempt to capture places and people who were, and could have been, with a passion for the paradox that holds life together. I have made no attempt to make them into typical haiku nor an attempt to keep them from it. While I was in China, the La Honda ones grew; while I was in La Honda the China poems grew. It was in this way the places grew into each other as times did. It was in this way both were Close To Home.
La Honda Journal: a Haiku Diary
by David E. LeCount
“Whatever certainties you may have come to about what a haiku is or isn’t, leave them outside the door and enter as a child. Here are poems that do not, and need not fit neatly into one of today’s commonly accepted molds. They bring to the fore another present time, just as vibrant and moving as the one in which you are reading this blurb. This is a diary of love poems — love of family, love of place, of what each new moment brings, be it pleasure or pain. And for punctuation you’ll find humor, that “karumi” (lightness) of which Basho spoke in his later years. Above all, these poems reveal joy, a love affair with life and its boundless potential.”
— Christopher Herold, haiku poet and author of Inside Out
A few haiku:
Catching a frog
with only my cupped hands
for his pond . . .
At midnight, a single dog bark
at the moon
perfects loneliness
An old wicker creel
still breathes of campfire smoke
and hidden mountain lakes
2012
by Diane Lee Moomey
“Place, ground, home: something searched for and not so much “found” as “grown.” Cell by cell, stone by stone, Place is created by the very longing for it”… (from back cover)
That longing! so keen in those of us who do not even remember the town we were born in; whose families moved so often that songs like “The Green, Green Grass of Home” are words with no meaning. So many of us! Such longing! that can be lidded for awhile, then will push its way to the surface and demand that Something be done about it.
In this collection of portraits, arranged in acts and scenes, the pilgrim “I” travels thoughtfully through the far north, the desert, caves, the oceanside; pushing bare toes into the earth at each spot, testing; moves through the lives of a few rare individuals who embody Place within their own beings, listening. Learning land; yearning for land. Discovering that this yearning is reciprocal…
A good book to tuck into your backpack as you head for the mountains – or up to the city!
2010
by Diane Lee Moomey
When the iron bird flies and horses run on wheels, the Tibetan people will be scattered like ants across the face of the earth, and the Dharma will come to the land of the red men.
Traditionally attributed to Padmasambhava, circa 800 CE
" Silk Road, Iron Bird is a long poem, a memoir of a month I spent in Kathmandu at the invitation of a new friend. I had never traveled outside the United States. As a beginning practitioner of Buddhism, I leapt at the opportunity to walk where my teachers had walked, to walk where the Buddha himself was said to have walked . . ." DLM
2011
