Each Moment All: Poems

by Larry Smith

Overview

Larry Smith s EACH MOMENT ALL takes a hard-eyed look at the sufferings human beings cause one another and the inequalities of the world we live in. And yet these poems take the full measure of human life, finding the peace and humor that reside in family, in love, and in those smallest, ordinary moments of each lived day. I especially admire the funny and spiritual poems about meditation here "Wrapped in the Buddha"; "Final Pilgrimage"; "Walking a Field into Evening"—and the way their casual, unforced grace help us to live our lives. - Robert Cording

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933964607
Publisher:	Bottom Dog Press
Publication date:	06/20/2012
Edition description:	Second Printing, slightly revised...2 additional poems
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Larry Smith was raised in the industrial Ohio River Valley. He and his wife Ann live along Lake Erie in Huron, Ohio. A graduate of Muskingum College and Kent State University, he has taught at BGSU Firelands College since 1971. Smith is the author of five books of fiction and nine books of poetry, including Tu Fu Comes to America (March Street Press 2010). His most recent novel is The Free Farm in the Appalachian Writing Series (Bottom Dog Press 2011). He co-edited America Zen: A Gathering of Poets. He and his wife Ann are two of the co-founders of Converging Paths Meditation Center in Sandusky, Ohio.

Read an Excerpt

COUNTING THE STARS



The mother and father, the teacher and priest,/

the policeman standing beside your car, /

all of them knowing, all of them sure, /

imposing old road maps onto the present./

It is written, they say and believe, and that knowing/

closes doors. Governments and institutions/

are built on the expected, constructed to a plan,/

solid and massive, square to the ground. /



And yet birds do fly, fish breathe through water,/

children run to you without expectation,/

seeing the possible in everything:/

icicles hanging from trees, the tail of a dog,/

a wet leaf they hold in their hand. /

And in you too they see all,/

erasing your pledge to memory, routine,/

the way you ve always been. "You be a tree,"/

they say, "I'll be your falling leaf."/

And you do, and you are more,/

tasting the joy of not knowing, together/

counting the uncountable stars./

Editorial Reviews

Here at last is Smith's 9th book of poems and one full of presence and poetry worth the wait. //



Larry Smith writes of life s constant and precious things—sunrises, birds, gardens, breakfasts, dogs, front porches and back yards. Teachers and poets. Parents and children. Those things that do not go away. Here is the conscious realization of all of them together as one in a personal matrix as simple and pure as the music of the moon. - mark s. kuhar, author of mercury in retrograde //

There s a Buddha in Larry Smith s Ohio garden. Peaceful, watchful and calm. Glide into these beautiful new poems like a bee, each one a petal of a bigger flower. -Allen Frost, author of The Mermaid Translation

From the Publisher