From Behind the Blind

By Robert Murphy

Poetry. "Robert Murphy's FROM BEHIND THE BLIND reveals the ambivalence of our condition rooted in visible and invisible orders, apprehended through symbols and signs as the expression of concealed wholeness. 'It is only when the dark as night appears / Within ourselves the stars the vault of heaven holds / no less than God.' Lakota shaman Black Elk calls this 'seeing in a sacred way.' Every proposition activates its opposite. Sights, sounds, smells open like psychic wormholes: a mother in the late stage of Alzheimer's merges with the Paleolithic Venus from a time before recorded memory; the gentleman farmer's butchered cow evokes Osiris in his lead coffin; the limb of an ash over a roof calls to the Norse Yggdrasil whose roots mirror its branches. 'We make love / To those who hold us prisoner, / to hear them cry out, "I surrender."' There's a joy in these poems shaped by despair in the awareness that holds both. What Murphy captures in this remarkable book is no less than the transformation of mind in the crucible of the open heart. He emerges from the blind more shaman than hunter Prospero moved past elegy to celebration." Paul Pines"

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1933675942
• ISBN13: 9781933675947
• Release Date: February 2013
• Publisher: DOS Madres Press
• Length: 62 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.