Nine Blue Moments for Robin by Michael Boughn
How unafraid these thinking loving poems are as they explore memory’s grief and delight, hommages for Robin Blaser – not about, but to a beloved friend and mentor. Boughn’s interlinked meditations conjure something of Blaser himself that anyone who knew him will recognise, and over which anyone who did not will wonder – celebration and grief, mind and body, urgency and laughter, all working together. Nine blue moments indeed, that resonate more fully than memory and may outlast it: “Enough depth,” the poet says, “to contain a sky.” The ache of that. —Peter Quartermain
How unafraid these thinking loving poems are as they explore memory’s grief and delight, hommages for Robin Blaser – not about, but to a beloved friend and mentor. Boughn’s interlinked meditations conjure something of Blaser himself that anyone who knew him will recognise, and over which anyone who did not will wonder – celebration and grief, mind and body, urgency and laughter, all working together. Nine blue moments indeed, that resonate more fully than memory and may outlast it: “Enough depth,” the poet says, “to contain a sky.” The ache of that. —Peter Quartermain
How unafraid these thinking loving poems are as they explore memory’s grief and delight, hommages for Robin Blaser – not about, but to a beloved friend and mentor. Boughn’s interlinked meditations conjure something of Blaser himself that anyone who knew him will recognise, and over which anyone who did not will wonder – celebration and grief, mind and body, urgency and laughter, all working together. Nine blue moments indeed, that resonate more fully than memory and may outlast it: “Enough depth,” the poet says, “to contain a sky.” The ache of that. —Peter Quartermain
meditations conjure something of Blaser himself that anyone who knew him will recognise, and over which anyone who did not will wonder – celebration and grief, mind and body, urgency and laughter, all working together. Nine blue moments indeed, that resonate more fully than memory and may outlast it: “Enough depth,” the poet says, “to contain a sky.” The ache of that.
—Peter Quartermain
Moving within the magical space of the number 9, Boughn writes his meditation as tribute to the magus poet Robin Blaser. This sharp and supple set of poems are energized with “scholarship and cosmos teeming/with the sense of a kiss that never/quite ends because its beginning/was impossible”. Boughn’s lines blend Eros and erudition, humor and critique.
— Hoa Nguyen
Michael Boughn's mind's eye moves between internal thoughts and the recognition of objects that are outside, written without remembering but residing here in these poems of honor and homage for Robin Blaser, one of Boughn's great teachers. Blaser's notion that poetry posits an arguing, weaving, and composing a cosmology and an epistemology is everywhere present in these poems, as is the emotional intensity of losing one held so dear as Robin -- in body and words.
—Kristin Prevallet
Book Information:
· Paperback: 28 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-062-0