In a week or two, a new and powerful collection of poetry
called "Cosmic Thrum" by
href="http://www.oraculartree.com/mcanally_bio.html">Mary
McAnally will be available from
href="http://www.angelfire.com/va/bcr/ptsn.html">Partisan Press.
This flat-spined publication is priced at for $14.00 (including
shipping). The Poet Christopher Butters says about this collection:
"The publication of Cosmic Rainbow by Partisan Press is an event for
those who have followed the growth of Mary McAnally's poetry in the
small press over the last thirty years. Present are poems many of us
have loved like "We Will Make a River ", "Pain Teaches Us" , "The
Great Beggs, Oklahoma Bank Robbery", as well as poems in solidarity
with the African revolution, poems about her beloved cardinals and
swallows, poems about the forgotten street people of New York .
Side by side with these are later poems occasioned by her return to
Oklahoma, her spiritual awakening and later ministership in Tulsa.
Unlike the Moral Majority, however – and very much like the poets
Thomas Merton, Daniel Berrigan and Ernesto Cardenal – her tango with
organized religion seems to have broadened rather than narrowed her
world outlook, and only deepened her wrath against the philistines
and money changers of our time.
Part memoir, part selected poems, Cosmic Rainbow gives witness to
one extraordinary woman's search for truth, meaning and solidarity
amid an American landscape ravaged by institutionalized
exploitation, sexism and racism. Part conversation with the dead,
part conversation with future generations, the later poems encourage
us all to explore the " thin places" -- that unitary reality that
McAnally's beloved Irish seers, magicians and prophets have long
claimed lies within each of us -- even as we rededicate ourselves to
the struggle for social justice in our time."
This book is an inspiring "must have" for those of us struggling
daily against the odds for a just society and a life changing read
for those new to the idea that a better world is possible.
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