Title:
A Love Letter to Darwin
By:
ane Crown
Genre: Poetry, Trade Paper
Publisher: Lummox Press (PO Box 5301 San Pedro, CA 90733-5301)
www.lummoxpress.com
Pages: 150
ISBN: 978-1-929878-21-5
USA Price: $15 + $3 Shipping
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WORLD Price: $15 + $10 Shipping
Publishing Date: August 2010
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Jane Crown's poems
express outbursts of honesty and truth, as the history of the heart can
best define it. From the thready lashes of vision and passion, the game
prize of the heart, the images try to reconcile and justify "the art of
living". Crown has come a long way from her first book. I am impressed!
Ann Menebroker
Throughout the book, Jane combines languages that evokes beauty, roughness, the personal, the ironic and the humorous. With keen observations, she "nimbly laces words together with her soft palate." and in my opinion, comes to the conclusion that though we lovers of men are haunted by them, they are worth it.
Diane Klammer
On reading the manuscript by Jane Crown I was obliged to look at myself and some of the things I hold dear, to reinvent my own definitions. As a self-described Mystical-Anarchist the first thing I noticed was her title, A Love Letter to Darwin. This title poem is a fine piece of work and holds some themes that evolve and mutate, just like life. Within my own framework they resonate very well with the world as I have experienced it. By pop-psychology definition anarchism is connected with chaos, which is a vague concept to relate anarchism to, and relatively untrue if you’ve read the basic concepts of anarchy. Even if it were true mathematicians describe chaos as having order. It is randomness that is without order in modern physics and mathematics.
Encapsulated in Crown’s work the theme of love, with all its chaos and in all its varieties and expressions, is the major thrust to this book. From personal and physical love, to the love of the human and animal spirit, she takes great joy in speaking what brings her to these ends.
Leonard J. Cirino (from the preface)
A few poems from the book
This House
“The best proof of love is trust.” Joyce Brothers
Your house; this heart
a place that has never been angry
a path to the door, always ajar
this hip holds nothing butterflies
imagine as petty on shelves or banisters
this cleft of ability to push out, hole up in
hold the cosmos back, smile; here within
your eyes finding my mouth,
a plump daisy creased,
vanity doesn't live here anymore;
strewn among plungers and
orange peels.
you have uncovered every
counter in the whole of me
in the insanity of aging
I am yours; resilient, agile
cupping iced tea, darned socks;
the simple complications of a
house in your love.
Kissing
A strawberry pim
lips like an oval
this; where the heart ends up
My bed a silver willow
bending the moon from afar
stay here in the red blossom of my love
Your teeth chattering
against the green dust of
your past
A coy fruited core
standing in the way of
your shyness
Come lay beside the ocean
of my kisses
It is wide and floats
With butterflies committing
suicide in a rage.
A Love Letter to Darwin
"We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.''
Charles Darwin
1)
There was a great bass in his spine
telling him to move as a turtle does
not swift, but with purpose
it was small at first
an anagram for a compass
to move without water, within
under and about the back and limbs
flexing
2)
And life was work
a solid thing to feed
to make haste
there was a razor in his heart
for splicing the code
to charm the fishes
find the path of muscle
3)
Within the buxom body
there was still not a name
but a thrum
a sinew, a marble
like a fistula in his gut
4)
Living said "eat,'' swam "breathe"
tattooing his fleshiness like an ex-patriot, coming
out from behind his divine curtain
it gave him the reason for God
5)
Breathing spoke like a nun in vespers,
like a Catholic
it held a salty berth, water and bone
cooperating beyond itself from the modus
but left itself to the device
a spring coiled like a
secret in his mime
fins followed all the creatures then
6)
Banking like a sailboat
below, above, into
and beyond sea grass
there became a path
now traversing each sigh of reason
7)
And here; finally, he stood
on his two pins; a manacle of
instinct, erect now, walking
his captive newborn earth
8)
This was thought, he sang
the praises of the past
as time repealed her pearl bell
and the creature dropped her
purple row into the
tumult of the life
given to spawn more
9)
Call him man now, gallant
fleshly, corporeal, tall
from an abyss that can be named, this;
the legs of life
will balance his spirit
see what and where he
lays his shadow in the sand
10)
He is clothed in memory
though he was never ours to hold
there is my letter to him, unfolding still
in my blood, in your pulse too
11)
Ungraciously divinity
has come to see him as madman
centuries still he shall reveal
his poesy to the turtles
finally shining reason against the bow
of all humanity.