Bower Lodge journeys inward to a wild landscape of joy, grief, and transformation. By turns mournful, meditative, incantatory, and rejoicing, this collection’s fresh, potent images and unforgettable, musical language carves a map into that hidden, holy world that lies deep at the core of our own. Likely to please fans of William Stafford, Robert Bly, Mary Oliver, and Nate Klug.
Bower Lodge is lightning on the mountain, night fires in the deep dark, a song of abandon from the throats of wolves. Below the fierce wilderness in this collection, each poem speaks with uncommon tenderness toward that which we too often avoid—the demands of love, the heart of a friend, the beauty of the uncontainable wild, the enfolding power of death, and the fearful ascent of new life. Paul J. Pastor’s poems are a kind of transcendence grounded in the earth, touched by water, while at the same time lifting toward a boundless sky of which we, in our human reality, know very little. Bower Lodge takes us in all our vulnerability, shapes our lives into earthen windborne vessels, and helps us ascend into a higher, deeper heaven. —Shann Ray, author of American Masculine, Sweetclover, and Atomic Theory 7, and winner of the American Book Award.
Selections
It is the granted
things we cannot comprehend. The child on a mountain
cannot see the mountain.
In this life,
doors are much like dreams. We can walk
both ways. They can close. Sometimes
we must knock.
If you let me see you, let me
love a small thing that you love, honor me
with your woeful and most purple
mourning, I believe our gulfs will shrink,
that we can just stretch to touch
a good thing which the other touches
Paul J. Pastor
is a poet, author, and editor (with Penguin Random House). His creative work has been featured or is forthcoming at The Windhover, Ekstasis, Solum Literary Press, Fathom, and other fine outlets, and has been anthologized by The New York Quarterly Review. He lives in Oregon.