Kirjahaku

Morteza, a young physician, makes his escape from a country like Iraq, finds asylum in one like Australia. Each year, he travels to his native land to treat the victims of terrorist explosions. Meanwhile, his new country turns fearful, mean-spirited, eager to shut its doors. On the armature of this story Neil Creighton weaves a work at once epic and lyric. A gifted poet with something urgent to say possesses a powerful voice, especially when his indignation is disciplined and his imagination fired by empathy. Morteza offers memorable and vividly particular imagery; yet no reader will fail to feel its universality.Robert Wexelblatt, author of Hsi-wei TalesThis powerful collection follows the lives of three characters: Morteza, a surgeon and refugee; his wife Rosa; and Atefeh, an amputee Morteza helps when he returns to his country of origin. Morteza explores dark themes like greed, lust for power, tyranny, cruelty, and disregard for the value of human life, yet throughout this often heartrending journey, images of war contrast with a sense of cosmic oneness-the clear night sky rising above a toxic fog. And although empires crumble, for the three protagonists, it is Love that endures. As Atefeh says, What is there but doing good, / loving mercy and believing / that love can triumph and reign / in this small heart of mine. May it be so Penny Harter, author of Still-Water Days"For all refugees and victims of war" is the dedication for this incredible story, a tale of the width and breadth of suffering that war causes. Fiction, yes, but also truth. And in the cloak of verse, this truth becomes a warning, a call for compassion, a plea for everyone to stop and consider our place in the process of wars and refugees and victims. Creighton invites me and you to walk along with him as Morteza, to learn to care. That is where we find the antidote to the ragged face of war. Powerfully written, painfully accurate, Morteza is worth more than a single reading.James E Lewis, author of leave a light on

A saga that sings In this new poem cycle-reminiscent at times of the best work of Homer, Jean Rhys and Hemingway-a father, Colquhoun, embarks on a perilous sea journey to rescue his daughter but finds himself on a challenging inner voyage as well. Meanwhile, his daughter's own path is no less difficult. Many surprises await them both. Having already loved Neil Creighton's earlier book, Rock Dreaming, I came to his Colquhoun Chronicles with high expectations. Happily, this new book-steeped in love, loss, hazard and human evolution-met and to some degree even exceeded them.-John Burroughs, U.S. Beat Poet Laureate. 2022-2023I compare the lyrical saga, The Colquhoun Chronicles, to the Odyssey and feel it is destined to become a classic. This hero's journey is not in mighty deeds of self-glorification but in learning how to be affected by stories not his own. Colquhoun learns compassion and understanding from historic women, from his surroundings and from creatures of the sea and sky. Part of its genius is that Miriam, Colquhoun's oppressed daughter, also experiences transformation, her "rescue" coming through her own growth in understanding rather than a "hero" coming to swoop her away. Deep wisdom and love are sprinkled throughout this five-star book and Creighton's words belong in everyone's heart.-Joan Leotta, author of Feathers on Stone Here is an adventure of the soul, a journey of self-discovery, and a history lesson about ourselves and our times. Though it might be difficult to imagine such breadth in one short book, The Colquhoun Chronicles taps into the zeitgeist. Colquhoun is a man who is forced by the circumstances of his life to confront himself. His new understanding is painfully wrung; this is an awakening both agonizing and revelatory. In Creighton's work you'll hear echoes of Coleridge and a touch of Keats. The poet has the spirit of the Romantic about him-you'll find beautiful verse within-but always tempered by a contemporary realism that is startling. Read and be prepared, like Colquhoun, to be changed.-Alan Walowitz, author of The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems

Neil Creighton's fine collection, Loving Leah, with its echoes of Lear and white-hot emotional center, is a symphony in a wounded key. Leah's daughter Cordelia confronts her mother's death and betrayal as she struggles back, through memory and nature's healing power, to the deep love that informed her childhood world. Creighton masterfully captures the sorrow of watching a beloved parent shrink away under the baleful influence of selfish daughters and he renders Leah's death scene with great power. You will not come away from this work unmoved, and you will be awed by the sense of hard-earned regeneration.Steve Klepetar, author of fourteen poetry collections, including The Li Bo Poems and My Son Writes a Report on the Warsaw GhettoIf Loving Leah puts you in mind of King Lear, it's quite intentional. Finding forgiveness within ourselves has never been easy. The hurt, the heavy heart, the torn-fabric of lives once intimately connected--all we believed ourselves to be must be faced and measured. This remarkable sequence of poems takes the reader down the entire rock-strewn and sometimes unnerving path. In the chapbook's concluding poem, "Tapestry," Creighton comes to the final letting go, which might, at last, allow for loving Leah again. You'll be moved, and changed, as much by Creighton's journey, as the arrival.Alan Walowitz, author of Exactly Like Love and The Story of the Milkman and Other PoemsNeil Creighton's gifts for incarnating feeling in memorable language, for sharp observation and clear-eyed honesty, are on glorious display in Loving Leah, a cycle of poems at once intimately personal and lamentably universal. Here Lear is Leah, an aging mother fading into fear and institutional care. The poet fills the role of Cordelia, loving, perplexed, unjustly excluded, forgiving. The story behind these poems is characterized by powerful emotional restraint, like a coiled spring. Moving back and forth over time, Loving Leah becomes a miniature saga with the poems carefully disposed into an arc of loss, mourning, resentment, dismay, grief, secrecy, guilt, acceptance. The residue is love. Robert Wexelblatt, whose works include Hsi-wei Tales and Girl Asleep and Other Poems

Neil Creighton's poems insist that it is time, long past time, to acknowledge crimes against indigenous people, to stop cloaking and hiding past colonialism and current racism with lies, to shine a light of honesty on what the legacy of the white invasion of Australia really is, and to begin creating a space of hope for healing. Painful, powerful, and truly necessary poetry.-Laura M. Kaminski, Managing Editor of Praxis Magazine Online and Author of five poetry collections and four chapbooks, including Anchorhold and The Heretic's Hymnal It is astonishing how Rock Dreaming reasserts Australia's precolonial history, confronts her colonial history, rewrites the history, and transcends its endless tyranny with a great anger, a greater insight, and a much greater empathy capable of healing the oppressed. The magic of this collection is rooted in Creighton's humane attention to the details of the conditions of the people whose lives his poems explore so powerfully.-Darlington Chibueze Anuonye, Curator of Daybreak: An Anthology of Short Nigerian Fiction The poems in Rock Dreaming approach their difficult subject matter in many ways. They are lyrical, journalistic, deeply personal, and historical. Often confronting, unflinching, almost cinematically brutal, they seek justice but never self-justification. In them Creighton seeks "to gouge a path of acknowledgment straight into the heart of national conscience." The poems reveal a tender heart and a desire to educate the reader about a buried history of genocide. We can only hope that works such as these can incite sufficient indignation and compassion to lead to whatever reparations are still possible.-Betsy Mars, Author of Alinea

In these poems we see the soaring height of imagination and poignant intensity of emotions. The minute wonders of poetic imagination in this collection will attract all readers of poetry.