I am hoping that The Weirding Storm, A Dragon Epic, takes off in sales. It is selling slowly, but Indra’s Net, which Ethel and I both have poems in, is already a huge success. It is published by Bennison Books, the same publisher that published The Weirding Storm in Great Britain, and currently it is number 1 in sales on amazon.com in the poetry anthology category. Deborah Bennison is a great editor! Her book featuring poets from all over the world is obviously a huge success!
Category Archives: Thomas Davis
Indra’s Net a Success!
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry, Published Books, Thomas Davis
Bennison Books Announces Publication of Indra’s Net
Bennison Books, the publisher of my new book, The Weirding Storm, A Dragon Epic, has just released a new international anthology of poetry called Indra’s Net. Ethel is honored to have three poems in this important anthology. I was fortunate enough to have two poems accepted.
Carol Rumens, the Poetry Editor for The Guardian, one of the United Kingdom’s most important newspapers, wrote in the forward that:
The title of this anthology, Indra’s Net, was suggested by one of its poets, the late Cynthia Jobin. She explained: “Indra’s net is a metaphor for universal interconnectedness. It’s as old as ancient Sanskrit and as ‘today’ as speculative scientific cosmology. It’s what came to mind when thinking about nets and webs and interconnectedness … and jewels and poems.”
All proceeds from the anthology’s sale will be donated to the Book Bus, a “charity [that] aims to improve child literacy rates in Africa, Asia and South America by providing children with books and the inspiration to read them.”
I hope some of those who read this blog and Ethel’s and my Facebook postings will purchase what is a worthy project well worth everyone’s support.
To get more information on Indra’s Net to go to: https://bennisonbooks.com/2017/07/13/indras-net-all-profits-to-the-book-bus-charity.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, poems, Poetry, Published Books, Thomas Davis
Poetry’s One Language: Taliesin in New Mexico
by Thomas Davis
Taliesin walked a sparse wood.
Pink and white stones sheered into cliffs.
This was not the wild seacoast where clerics and bards warred,
declaiming words of power,
but a land as dry as Job’s tongue:
“Where shall wisdom be found?”
The bard had stood on a black rock jutting into sea-fury.
He had called mists and forest spirits,
swarming to gestures and words like ghostly raiments,
then walked through a shimmering gate into sweltering skies.
Standing below a tall, red cliff, he sent his spirit
across a dry land and walked,
feeling poetry falter in the great silence.
On a sandstone table he stopped and stared at hairy black spiders.
A thousand scuttled across the red stone in frenzy.
He could not understand spider’s movement’s language.
He could not feel poetry’s spirit ebb and flow
where no coracle boats or sailing ships plied waves.
He studied a turquoise juniper tree’s green flame
and tried to feel how such small trees could walk,
but they seemed rooted in fields of pink and white stone.
Taliesin trudged with his staff through a long day.
Sun blazed; a horned moon, waxing, rose.
The bard’s heart shuddered.
How was he to escape a land where poetry was tenuous?
Where no selkie dived beneath waves into seaweed forests?
He listened: Women’s voices elegant and wild with frenzy –
Men speaking words as strange as the landscape.
A red wolf howled beneath stars and horned moon.
A cold wind blew.
Pinyon, pine, and juniper branches danced and sang.
The bard smiled and raised arms out of his brown robe.
He spoke poetry’s one language to night sky, trees, and wind.
A black rock jutted into a foaming, wind-driven sea.
Note: The is a rewrite of a poem posted a long time ago.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
The Weirding Storm is Published!
The Weirding Storm, A Dragon Epic has been published by Bennison Books. It is now available at amazon.com.
The U.S. Amazon address is:
The address for Bennison Books, a UK publisher, is: https://bennisonbooks.com.
I am hoping that anyone who purchases the book from Amazon, either U.S. or U.K. Amazon, will also review the book. That helps publicize it in the amazon universe.
I am really excited about this publication. Bennison Books publishes some of my favorite poets and to be part of their stable with one of the best books I have ever written gives me an euphoric feeling. I hope some of you will be willing to be transported to another world where dragons and humans still co-exist along with witches, warriors, and battles, to paraphrase Terence Winch, one of the U.S.’s greatest poets.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Published Books, The Dragon Epic, Thomas Davis
In the Time of the Black Snake
by Thomas Davis
an irrelgular sonnet
The buffalo come stomping, snorting, blowing.
The blizzard howls like old men throwing fits
Of rage against the way their bones are creaking
Into another year, arthritis stirring
Up aches so harsh their anger steals their wits.
Snow crusts on dark hides, slows their stamping, singing
Until the universe becomes a song
Protesting how long drills drill into earth,
Into the heart of who the peoples long
To be inside the spirit of their birth,
Inside the breaths that make them who they are,
A being on the earth made from the star-
Stuff spun into the dance against the snake,
The warriors singing as they stomp and shake.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
Sustaining the Forest, the People, and the Spirit, the story of the Menominee Tribe’s Sustainable Forest, is Back in Paperback
My book, Sustaining the Forest, the People, and the Spirit, published by State University of New York (SUNY) Press, is still in print. I was afraid SUNY was going to let it go out of print, but they have printed new paperbacks, which they had sold out of a long time ago. The price is pretty high, but I’m excited by this development. It’s always good to not go out of print.
Sustaining the Forest, the People, and the Spirit tells the wonderful story of the Menominee Indian Tribe and how they have sustained their 230,000 acre forest in ways that have enhanced, rather than degraded, the environment in the face of development pressures. Through a careful look at Menominee history, politics, institutions, economy, culture, spirituality, science, and technology, I tried to provide insight into how this case study of sustainable environmental development can offer a rough road map for other communities to follow.
Filed under Essays, Thomas Davis
Beyond the Fire of Stars
by Thomas Davis
Words crawl, or dance, or hurl into the air,
And as their meanings symphony
A universe born from complexity
Derived from how we humans try to bear
The waves of minutes marching unaware
Toward an ocean that no one can see,
Life crawls and dances, hurls its vibrancy
Past any time of hope or bleak despair.
As thin as paper deep with crawling words,
We dance and hurl ourselves into our world
As life swirls time into the thoughts we are
And consciousness, like sparkling hummingbirds,
Discerns, then speaks of times and meanings curled
Into eternities beyond the fires of stars.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
Nature’s Implacable Force
by Thomas Davis
In North Dakota’s winter frost drives deep
Into the ground, soils compacted tight
Until, in spring, the ground heaves, water seeps
Into the soils, and land begins to write
The story of another spring, the slow,
Implacable force nature heaves and cracks
Into the manmade things, the bravado
Of buildings, pipelines, streets, steel railroad tracks.
Inside an empty field an apple tree
Has grown into the crumbling of a farm.
It stands where once a lively family
Built walls to keep them safe and free from harm.
This pipeline will not ever fail, they say.
It won’t leak. Not a minute. Not a day.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
An Elder’s Prayer
by Thomas Davis
They frack the earth. Drills fly into the soil
And whirl through rock, a stream of chemicals
Shot down into the shale, the oracles
Of business, profit, subjugation, oil
Enraptured by technology, the coil
Inside the engine driving humankind,
The writ of progress, greed, force sealed and signed.
The oilmen say, we need the fracked-up oil.
An elder walks into the winter cold
And kneels beside a frozen lake and lifts
His arms toward dark clouds, his spirit bold
Enough to recognize creation’s gifts.
“The radiance of water, soil, and sky,”
He sang. “Is in a baby’s first-breath cry.”
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis, Uncategorized
Shiva’s Dancing
by Thomas Davis
Ben Naga published a short poem on his blog, https://bennaga.wordpress.com:
SHIVA’S DANCING
Inhale thyme, the spice of life
Dance the music of rhythm
A tapestry woven through
Time and space in harmony
I responded with free verse:
And inside Orion, where gas the size of planets spit
out of a black hole’s enormous yaw,
and where incubators blaze suns out of what seems light,
but is really reactors coalescing into the splitting of nuclei,
Shiva went walking.
As he walked he felt, rather than saw, the forces of destruction
annihilating into the forces of creation,
and the foment caused by his walking and his thoughts
inside a place generating the growth of a galaxy
let him sit on the side of a mountain in the Himalayas
as a snow leopard and two spotted cubs
leapt from a ledge of old ice
toward a cliff face where mountain goats danced with dark hooves away
into clouds descended from heaven.
Ben Naga responded to that by saying, I like the poem. So full of powerful imagery. Should I challenge you to tame this outpouring into a sonnet?
I responded:
Shiva’s Dancing
Gas from a black hole’s yaw hurled massively
To deep, deep space. In Orion suns blazed
Out from the incubator galaxy,
New stars a coalescing plasma raised
From clouds of light as Shiva walked
In nothingness and felt unraveling
Annihilate into creation as he stalked
Through dances of light’s christening.
Upon a Himalayan mountaintop
He sat. Snow leopards, muscling with grace,
Leapt from a ledge of ice, the yawing drop
Below them sheer, a cliff’s dark, rocky face.
Two mountain goats danced, dark with hooves, away
Into a cloudy heaven’s roiled ballet.
One thing links to another, then causes a reaction that has, somehow, the definition of creativity inside it.
Filed under poems, Poetry, Thomas Davis
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