The Great Unrest - Softcover

Brandi, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1945680296 ISBN 13: 9781945680298

Publisher: White Pine Press, 2019

Synopsis

"The poems in John Brandi's new collection, The Great Unrest, illuminate a lifetime of travels―southern Italy, Crete, India, China, Alaska, the Caribbean―as well as the intimate landscape of New Mexico, his homeland for fifty years. Sober, unfiltered, defiant and pulsing with joie de vivre, these poems represent the interior and exterior world of a seeker who refuses to give in to the darkness of our times."

About this title

About the Author:

John Brandi has been an active walker, writer, visual artist since boyhood rambles in the mountains of California. He continues to seek source and renewal in his travels abroad and in New Mexico, his home for fifty years. In 2015 a limited edition of his Southwest prose poems, Into the Dream Maze, was issued by the Press at the Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe; followed by Planet Pilgrim, his paean to Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki. He received a Touchstone Distinguished Books Award 2017 for A House By Itself: Selected Haiku Masaoka Shiki.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Hiking Stone Mountain Trail

Fifty years
up these slopes, in & out
bareboned canyons

Walking stick lacquered
with a million-dollar sheen

Mercury sailing through
high-altitude blue

Life
perfectly still, moving
before the eye

Sun upside down
as I bend to tie a shoe.

Stealing the Fruit

Cold morning.
Sit down to work, warm my hands
under my legs―

Get in the mode
watching coyote slip under the gate
eyeing fallen apples.

The song I’d sing
soft, uproarious, bush burning
stilled in the breeze

Must be a slip through the gate
like coyote, stealing the fruit
that sends me.
Floating with the Current

“What wonder to be where you are
and know it,” Joanne writes.

To let the path end
right where you stop, find yourself
at center, snowgeese circling,
sunlight flooding the plain.

A place where mountains rise,
valleys sink, and shadows move
in uncertain light,

where, just out the door
the brink of something irregular
is exposed: rugged, undefined
―time, without
its usual frame.

A knife-sharp butte on the horizon
growing thinner in the wind . . .

The weightless curve
of the river, deepening the gorge . . .

How imagination gathers,
fills the pail with moonlight
then leaves you
to the place itself,
what holds you.
Wishing for Rain

The long stretch of fields . . .
apricot dazzle where the sun has set.

Go in, close the door, let the moon
fill my glass through the window.

I’d like rain tonight
I’d like sails!

Want the songbirds back
under the eaves, frogs up from
their inside-out galaxies.
I need those reminders―

Need the spring rain
a clear and secret rap
from the upper Realm
just to know
I’m really cranking.
Bright No Cloud Day

My age spots
have vanished, look at them go!

Off seeding the Journey
with better understanding
Off decorating the sundial
with fluttering hosannas

Called by the swoon
of the horizon, into the Bardo realm
of the dead, who know Time
is finally on their side.

No earth shaking message,
yet here it is on a bright no-cloud day
like shavings of fools gold
cupped in
heaven’s air.

About this edition

• Publisher: White Pine Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1945680296
• ISBN 13: 9781945680298
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 120