Cypher Garden - Softcover

Rummel, Mary Kay

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1421837811 ISBN 13: 9781421837819

Publisher: Blue Light Press, 2017

Synopsis

Mary Kay Rummel was  the first Poet Laureate of Ventura County, CA. Cypher Garden is her eighth published poetry book, her sixth full collection. The Lifeline Trembles, was co-winner of the 2014 Blue Light Press Award. This Body She’s Entered, her first book, won the Minnesota Voices Award for poetry and was published by New Rivers Press in 1989. Her work has appeared in numerous regional and national literary journals and anthologies and has received several awards, including six Pushcart nominations. Mary Kay has read in many venues in the US, England and Ireland and has been a featured reader at poetry festivals including Ojai and San Luis Obisbo, CA. She loves to perform poetry with musicians. A professor emerita from the University of Minnesota, Duluth, she and her husband, Conrad, teach part time at California State University, Channel Islands. They live and play with their grandchildren in California and Minnesota. marykayrummel.com

 

 

About the Cover Artist

Colleen McCallion is an artist from Laguna Beach, California. This is her fourth collaboration with Mary Kay Rummel after meeting at the Vermont Studio Center.

The cover oil painting titled  “Resting Mother” represents the artist, the mother, tired from her duties, holding her “seedlings”, her four children. The looming calla is her joy and her spirit, ever-present, even in sleep.

About this title

Review:

In Mary Kay Rummel’s poems there is no separation between the spiritual and the sensual. Even as a child, she writes, I longed to spend my life in praise. Cypher Garden is in fact a rich compendium of praises, its meticulously crafted and nuanced poems honoring animals, art, landscape, admirable human beings and the inmost geography of the soul. Perhaps most bracingly, Rummel continues to reclaim realms of experience to which her early religious upbringing forced her to say no. This book encompasses an entire cosmos toward which the poet cathartically rushes, senses open like mouths shouting Yes! Her gift to the reader is an exhilarating sense of having traveled far without leaving the heartıs house.

—Thomas R. Smith, Author of The Glory and The Foot of the Rainbow

Mary Kay Rummel’s Cypher Garden is a praise song to the natural world, to the amplitude of any moment of lived experience – a proposition ‘guided by color, by light’ as Van Gogh was – to the primordial and female yearning to fully fall into tenderness with all her eyes see, her hands touch.

—Marsha de la O, Author of Antidote for Night, winner of

Isabella Gardner Award

Czeslaw Milosz said in his Ars Poetica that the purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will. Mary Kay welcomes these guests and they speak of the land, of animals and saints, of nuns and convents, of marriage, children and travels to Ireland, Scotland, France and so much more. No matter the subject, these poems are illuminations.  Stanley Kunitz said Mary Kay’s poems have and sustain an oracular voice and so they do, sometimes prophetic and always lustrous and generous to the reader’s psyche. 

—Lois Jones, Author of Night Ladder

In a voice both elemental and ancient, Mary Kay Rummel’s artful lines of Cypher Garden explore the discovery of self and others. These rich, dense poems meander among nature and faith, current events and travel, personal history and poetry, balancing between observation and invention. Wise and honest, brushed with bold colors, Rummel converses, in language saturated with vision, with other writers and artists, most notably Vincent van Gogh, where “the wind/ tast[es] of orange flower and orange rind.” A spectacular collection to read again and again. And again.

—KB Ballentine, Author of The Perfume of Leaving

About this edition

• Publisher: Blue Light Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1421837811
• ISBN 13: 9781421837819
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 122