Yes, Master

By Michael Earl Craig

In his second book, Michael Earl Craig blurs the line between the documentary and imaginative impulses. The resulting poems mutilate pastoral myths--a man who has ignored horses his whole life but now wants to try touching one, or two gay donkeys and their uneventful lives on the high plains--but also pay tribute to the current-day West in which Craig lives.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0977106462
• ISBN13: 9780977106462
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: Fence Books
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.7" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Observes the mundane and reveals that the whole of daily life is much more than its seemingly ordina

The second book by author and farrier Michael Earl Craig, Yes, Master merges autobiography, creativity, and poetry into a free-verse collection of short, often comical, and sometimes wistful poetry. Often pausing amid reflections to astutely contemplate the role of everyday objects, from an anvil to a soft black derby to marvelously designed wristwatches, Yes, Master observes the mundane and reveals that the whole of daily life is much more than its seemingly ordinary parts. "Glass of Vodka": Allen was at a barbecue. / He was checking out Gary's wife / through the bottom of a glass of vodka / from which he was drinking. / He thought: What is the word / for when a nun rolls a boulder / away from the mouth of a cave or tomb?

Yes, Master: The Chun-tzu of Magical Spontanaeity

Chun-Tzu: The ideal of a person who uses divination to order his/her life in accordance with the Tao rather than willful intention." -Stephen Karcher, translator of the I-Ching On the highway, it is not rare to see a wave, all alone, one wave separated from the ocean. It is absolutely useless, does not constitute a set. This is a case of magical spontaneity. - Henri Michaux, from "In the Land of Magic" Please welcome the chun-tzu of magical spontanaeity. I can find no better way to invite you to the "spontaneous wave" universes of Michael Earl Craig. What else can you expect from a book whose title invokes both the tragicomic subservience of Igor and the unflinching readiness of a student of the Tao? If you have not yet experienced the psychic pervasiveness and electrochemical expansiveness of this poet, you should pity your own ignorance. Get off your knuckles and evolve into the poetry of THIS millenium. Say "yes" to this book. Master it. I won't attempt to give you any chumpish little blurbs of synopsis for these poems for the simple fact that there is but one way to say these poems, and Mike Earl Craig has found that way. Beneath the perfect wit of these poems, is a humility and a sincerity so sustaining, so necessary to the American psyche, we should pay taxes to it. Within this book you will find not poems, but spells, the kind that can only be unearthed by a man who has dedicated his daily work to shoeing horses and his nightly work to revealing the underfloor of this thing we call America. Mike Earl Craig launches himself from dizzying peaks and down, down, down into the tiniest fissures, the most overlooked moments of a singular day. Here, the mundane becomes monstrous. Here, the simple things we take for granted bloom into flames so sudden and fleeting, we are left groping the floor for ashes. The Oldest School of poetry says that the poet must master the art of revelation. With this fine book, this startling pyre of ink and paper, Michael Earl Craig has proven that "Yes" is a commitment to the long lost art of humility before the sur-rational holiness that saturates our common (and paradoxically uncommon) lives.

Excellent Second Book

Earl Craig is decidedly a fresh breeze in the poetry world. This, his second installment, creates imagery and feeling surpassed by few of the modern poets. I can only highly recommend this work as a must read.