Jeffery Beam

Reminiscent of Eastern Bhakti love poetry, and Western Troubadour and Green Man traditions, Verdant recounts a mid-life passage within a shadowed natural landscape of intense physical and spiritual longing. At the age of 42, queer poet Jeffery Beam fell in love with a younger man, threatening his then 15-year relationship. These poems were born of that spiritual alchemical blaze, and its substantial healing power. The poet-lover's sacred quest through heartbreak, suffering, grief, and regret, progresses ultimately to a joyful ecstatic reunion with the Beloved Divine. A mini-essay, "Don't Forget Love: Sacred Longing's Dark Project," further illuminates the actual, mythological, and spiritual origins of the poems, and describes the poet's lifetime search through experience, teachings, and literature, to a condition in which Desire and Love enrich instead of subsume the Self.

An intense "marvelous and fateful game," Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements brings to the page a six-month blogosphere collaboration between Welsh painter Clive Hicks-Jenkins and American poet Jeffery Beam, depicting a Hero's journey through death, resurrection, psychological and spiritual trials, and revelations into redemptive vision. Originating loosely in an ancient Welsh folk tradition and the death of the painter's father, painter and poet marry their impressive powers of myth and dream into individual but sympathetically resonant designs--inward landscapes wrought startlingly real--at turns plain and flamboyant, poignant and joyful. "The grace of these paintings and poems is in their wildness," fashioned ultimately by Hicks-Jenkins' and Beam's compassionate confrontation with dark forces, reviving forgotten knowing and healing powers, as pilgrim/hero meets Horse/Man, thus "patching up some almighty fear in the fabric of heaven" and the searching self. Features twenty-one full color illustrations, sixteen poems, and illuminating essays by Sarah Parvin, Mary-Ann Constantine, and Claire Pickard. Book design by J.C. Mlozanowski.

Poetry is an enrapturing process that intensifies the discovery of experience and only what arises out of this urgency produces utterance that is distinctive and honest. Here in these sinewy acts shine the mobilities of praise, the delight in the body's beauty and its surprises, the wonder of beholding energy and love.