Flowers & Sky: Two Talks

Flowers & Sky: Two Talks brings together two lectures and a suite of unpublished poems by one of our finest lyric poets. These intimate talks use Aaron Shurin’s own work to illustrate the power and practice of image-making at the deepest level. The result is a continual act of discovery, part poetics, part literary autobiography, and part three-dimensional bibliography. The book includes a digital download of Aaron reading “Sometime of the Night” and the poems, bringing the work alive into full sonority.

With the talks, poems, and recordings together, the book offers a short course in poetic practice and a glimpse into a unique life, making and made by art.

“Intensely interrogative… Shurin has created a body of work sparked by the low and inspired by the high… always spiraling more and more poetic thought… Once he has given us his flowers of the field talk, Shurin raises his head skyward. It is a wonderfully balanced maneuver, giving us a parallel of particular with universal… Shurin keeps his focus on the revelations in each governing image… At once literary criticism and memoir, Flowers & Sky gives cutting insight into the poetic process illuminating for readers and writers alike.’ — Daniel Casey, in Heavy Feathers Review

“What is a flower but a momentary eruption of streaming energy, of the power of generation and the condensation of senses into a fleeting burst of creative impulse, a poem blasting forth in temporal vibrations by which we might fall in love with the world again as though awakening from a dream.”

Audio

We post selections from our books on SoundCloud, but a full reading of Flowers & Sky: Two Talks to download can be found on our audio page.