Lifting the Stone: Poems

By Jason Sommer

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0948259949
• ISBN13: 9780948259944
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Dufour Editions
• Length: 94 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Lifting the Stone

The Title Lifting the Stone suggests that Jason Sommer's poems have to do with growing into a birthright, which for Theseus meant becoming a hero in the mythology of a heroic culture. Like Theseus, Sommer struggles to find a place in "the story," in his case the Jewish mythos, which more than any single influence informs this collection. But Sommer offers more than the mythic. Original perception, uninformed by story, interests him equally as a way of knowing the world. "Amnesia" recreates the moment when an awakening sleeper, like some daily Adam, does not know the name or use of anything. Even in poems named for biblical figures - "Samuel," "David," "Thomas Called Didymus" - Sommer tests the old stories, taking an original stance, making of an ancient life an experience felt anew. The poems in Lifting the Stone are about knowing and seeing, about trying on psychologies, about viewing old scenes from surprising new angles, about seeing ourselves most clearly when we are looking at someone else, about remembering, when dreaming, a dream forgotten when awake. Mythic heritage, personally felt, and personal experience, informed by tradition, interact in these poems. Overcoming "resistance to memory," Sommer achieves a clear vision of the past in the present and of the other-in-self. --- from book's back cover