Writing My Yoga: Poems for Presence - Softcover

Fran Shaw

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0963910027 ISBN 13: 9780963910028

Publisher: Indications Press, 2009

Synopsis

These poems and journal entries are a memoir of eight summers' work with a spiritual guide in the high alpine village of Chandolin, Switzerland. Each poem in Writing My Yoga brings a moment of awareness, an invitation to feel the silence around the words. With a section on how to compose one's own yoga poems. Includes the poem Guru on Ice, Winner, Poetic Journeys award.

An Excerpt: Clearing the Rains

When the fog disappears from the meadow
with a fine mist on the wing,
softly the wind stirs the pine boughs;
softly the morning can sing.

All life comes alive in the sunlight,
the rocks no less fine than the air;
the clouds roll away in their own time
the moment we see what we share.

This new way to live with each other,
this shining which nothing can mar,
will give us a gift without measure:
the freedom to be who we are.

About this title

About the Author:

Fran Shaw, Ph.D., is the author of Notes on The Next Attention, recollected talks of a spiritual guide. She also wrote the popular handbook 50 Ways to Help You Write. A Danforth Fellow and a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, winner of the Amy Loveman Poetry Prize and two national awards for poetry, she is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut at Stamford. She has been guiding writing workshops around the world for over twenty years.

Review:

The astonishing passion of Fran Shaw's collection leaves an indelible trace of a world behind the mundane, a world empty of all claims except to taste it deeply. --David Appelbaum, Former Editor of Parabola

Few writers can capture the essence of a moment as spot-on as Shaw. In Writing My Yoga, her spiritual journey leads to a realization that the best way to live and write is to be reborn not once a lifetime but once a second. --Allia Zobel-Nolan, Former Senior Editor, Reader's Digest Books

With these poems, Fran Shaw opens a new era of poetry, an era of genuine hope. Blessed by a sojourn in high places of the earth and of the spirit, she is here able, again and again, to fulfill William Blake's prophecy, If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. I have kept various watchwords before me in poetry writing groups, but Shaw has brought me, shiningly realized, what I was groping toward. I am profoundly grateful for these poems. For a little while after I finished reading them, I saw with those eyes. When I looked up, outside my window the lilac bush stirring in the wind was the teaching. --Martha Heyneman, author of The Breathing Cathedral

About this edition

• Publisher: Indications Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0963910027
• ISBN 13: 9780963910028
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 84