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Abstract
This collection of forty-three original poems explores the problems of re-entering conscious, personal, chronological history in order to illumine its unconscious counterpart, "a wall of leaping darkness." By confronting this darkness, the poet is able to surmount the wall, bringing forth images which bridge the personal with the communal, the chronological with the cosmic. What results is a reincarnation of memory as metaphor in which material events are transposed into word-paintings.
The sections are arranged in the order of: (I) tribal narratives in lyric form; (II) lyric biomythographies of childhood memory; (III) lyric fictions of adult relationship; (IV) lyric meditations of the spiritual laws of cause and effect within an erotic context: (V) lyric visions of re-enactment in which personal history is redeemed of its mortal content.
The formal techniques of free verse are employed. Special emphasis is placed upon the free verse revelation of karmic memory in which reservoirs of experience are re-visited and, in the process, reincarnated through sound, rhythm, and image. "A Wall of Leaping" exemplifies, above all, the poetics of embodiment and hieroglyphics practices by such poets as Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, and Muriel Rukeyser.
This collection includes work previously published in literary magazines or presented in public readings.
