Meditations by the Sea: Poems Volume 1

By Gail Rooke

What is it to be human and temporary? The poems in the chapbook Meditations By The Sea examine both a great joy in being alive in the glorious natural world, while bumping up against an inability to fathom its immensity. The poet finds comfort in the dreamscapes which abound in nature, a sanctuary of sorts. Throughout, there is a reverence for the natural world. Images rise up and flourish, en plein air, painted by a voice that is personal -- sometimes a participant, sometimes an onlooker. Gail Rooke probes the permanency which outlasts a human life, the experience of despair and hopelessness, and finally, the concession and resolution to find satisfaction and grace in a few ecstatic moments. Her voice lyrics a birth-song, and then, an elegy. The poems celebrate the small or forgotten, a wild rose, imprints in the sand, silverfish hiding in a riverbank --- while also rejecting the other face of human experience, the blood-gush of wars, the normalizing of evil, the abandonment of a child. A mountain is a burial place of armies in one poem; in another, a place for birds to rest. In the end, the poems in Meditations By The Sea provide the echoes of the push and pull of the ocean, the two sides of meditation -- joy and grief -- and the reminder that there is a temporary synthesis humans must find, over and over.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1483588629
• ISBN13: 9781483588629
• Release Date: February 2017
• Publisher: Bookbaby
• Length: 60 Pages
• Weight: 0.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.8" x 8.8"