Deena Metzger

Description:

Poetry arises from the search for sacred language that describes the awe and mystery of the real world. Deena Metzger is a contemporary poet who has aligned herself with this ancient tradition. This collection, that includes selections from her earlier books of poetry, Dark Milk, The Axis Mundi Poems, Looking For the Faces of God, A Sabbath Among the Ruins and Skin:Shadows/Silence, draws on her life’s work, more than forty years of devotion to the word, and aligns itself with such a quest for meaning that has increasing urgency because of the spiritual and political ruins of our time. It is no longer sufficient, she believes, for the poet to be an unacknowledged legislator of the world, for the committed poet is called to engage with full heart in the continuous activity of restoration on behalf of beauty, wisdom and the natural world. Here we meet the articulate voices of the otherwise silenced, the voices of the animals, the land and the elementals, rain, wind fire and earth, and our responsibility to them. This book combines a searing look at the horrors that we permit, the anguish of human cruelty, brutality, and indulgence, but carrying the fierce determination to live, act, and write on behalf of the soul in all its manifestations. In this collection, despair is acknowledged but not indulged, as Metzger engages in the meticulous task of reconstructing a world, informed by the past and history as language demands, but, extracting ourselves from its violence and caprices, looking toward a viable future and all its unexpected possibilities.

Description:

What does it mean to meet the spirit in our mundane world? How do we communicate with the other side? Can we really forge a proof that the dead live on among us? A young American writer, having long admired the work of Argentine writer Julio Cortazar, travels to France in 1974 to meet him, hoping to commune with a literary soul mate and to create a political alliance in the face of the brutal coup that has overtaken Chile. But circumstances compromise their brief encounter, and for years afterwards, though she and Cortazar correspond through books and letters, she feels unfulfilled by what she knows could have been a far more meaningful collaboration between them. The writer feels this loss all the more keenly when Julio Cortazar dies . . . until inexplicable signs and portents lead her to understand that their relationship has not ended; the deceased writer may have more to say to her. She becomes obsessed with reaching Cortazar. She tries to summon him into her life with all the force of her mind, heart, and will. She imagines writing a book with a dead man, but without resorting to trickery or fantasy, and her attempts to conjure forth Cortazar’s spirit create a bizarre triangle between Julio, the writer and her bemused husband. Ultimately the writer’s search for the door that will open between two worlds leads her to question the very nature of reality . . . and to the strange, joyous climax of her seemingly impossible quest. In Doors: A Fiction For Jazz Horn, Deena Metzger has achieved something wholly unique– a book about writing a book that has all the suspense of a great thriller, and the depth of a profound metaphysical mystery.

Description:

“The Other Hand is Metzger’s masterwork … scientific … imaginitive … speculative … spiritual.”—Marc Kaminsky

“An amazing experience…this novel explores the boundaries of evil…the physical laws of the universe…light and darkness.”—Ariel Dorfam, Center for International Studies