The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy

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“This collection would make a lovely gift for a poetry-loving or dharma-practicing friend, it could also serve as a wonderful gateway to either topic for the uninitiated.”—Tricycle: The Buddhist Review

 

“Jubilant, thoughtful, startling, and pure, the poems in The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy remind us that every poem is a pond, and every pond a poem. Slow down. Dip your toes. See the ripples in each reflected moon. Swim a while in the deep brilliance of language, image, and sound.”—Dinty W. Moore, author of The Mindful Writer and Director of Creative Writing, Ohio University

THE POETRY OF IMPERMANENCE, MINDFULNESS, AND JOY

John Brehm

The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy received the Spirituality & Practice Book Award for 50 Best Spiritual Books in 2017 by Spirituality and Practice Website.

The poems expertly gathered here offer all that one might hope for in spiritual companionship: wisdom, compassion, peacefulness, good humor, and the ability to both absorb and express the deepest human emotions of grief and joy. The book includes a short essay on “Mindful Reading” and a meditation on sound from editor John Brehm—helping readers approach the poems from an experiential, non-analytical perspective and enter into the mindful reading of poetry as a kind of meditation.

The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy offers a wide-ranging collection of 129 ancient and modern poems unlike any other anthology on bookshelves today. It uniquely places Buddhist poets like Han Shan, Tu Fu, Saigyo, Ryokan, Basho, Issa, and others alongside modern Western poets one would not expect to find in such a collection—poets like Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, William Stafford, Denise Levertov, Jack Gilbert, Ellen Bass, Billy Collins, and more. What these poems have in common, no matter whether they are explicitly Buddhist, is that all reflect the essential truths the Buddha articulated 2,500 years ago.

The book provides an important poetic complement to the many prose books on mindfulness practice—the poems here both reflect and embody the dharma in ways that can’t be matched by other modes of writing. Its unique features include an introduction that discusses the themes of impermanence, mindfulness, and joy and explores the relationship between them. Biographical notes place the poets in historical context and offer quotes and anecdotes to help readers learn about the poets’ lives.

book information
  • Paperback
  • 312 pages, 4.5 x 6.5 inches
  • $17.95
  • ISBN 9781614293316
  • ebook
  • 312 pages
  • $14.99
  • ISBN 9781614293422
about the author
The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy

John Brehm is the author of several books of poems, The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy and The Dharma of Poetry, Sea of FaithHelp Is On the Way, and No Day at the Beach. He is the associate editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry and his poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, New Ohio Review, The Sun, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, The Writer’s Almanac, The Norton Introduction to Literature, Best American Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and teaches for Literary Arts and Mountain Writers Series in Portland and for the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, Colorado.

Other books by John Brehm:
Dharma Talk
The Dharma of Poetry

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