Alburnum of the Green and Living Tree by Lara Candland

Could we carry all the names for every possible green in our heads, our hearts, on our tongues, in language? Candland shows us that all the names for green exist not in the adjective but in the living; the watcher’s task is to pay attention to the sap as it surges through every gesture and word.  A domestic flaneur of the daily, Candland takes delight in that watching, where “there is no other / better summer” than here.

—Eleni Sikelianos

Lara Candland is the artist of a living word. Alone among us, she seems best to know the inward texture of a basket and the hastening green of April branches. Hers is an intimate universal, and in Alburnum of the Green and Living Tree this intimacy becomes the vivid pretext of many truths.

—Donald Revell

Lara Candland’s gorgeous first book opens quietly enough in a landscape rendered through impression, wit, and play. But as the poet explores the urgencies of sustenance--food, childbirth, the body—we are caught by a gaze both keen and intimate, by a voice intent upon pulling us into the “breath in / and the breath out and the breath / expelled past expulsion.”  With Alburnum of the Green and Living Tree Candland has invented through language a new and deeply lived ecotope.

—Janet McAdams

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Lara Candland’s pamphlet Tongue Child, was published in the Palanquin/TDM series at the University of South Carolina/Aiken, and individual poems have been published or are forthcoming in Free Verse, Fence, The Colorado Review, Barrow Street, EOAGH, Alimentum, Fine Madness, Gloom Cupboard, FRiGG, Ghoti Fish, Hip Mama, and the defunct Quarterly.   Candland is also an award-winning playwright and librettist and a founder of avant-garde chamber opera company Seattle Experimental Opera.  Candland’s libretto, Sunset with Pink Pastoral, was a finalist in the Genesis competition and was performed at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre.  Her work is a favorite with composers, and settings of her poems and libretti have been performed and recorded in many international venues and broadcasts. She teaches Language and Culinary Arts, often simultaneously, at The Walden School of Liberal Arts in Provo, Utah where she lives with her husband, composer Christian Asplund, and their five children.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 68 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 9781935402893