Tune in to Irving Toast, Poetry Ghost on http://www.kruufm.com
Robert McDowell’s poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared
in hundreds of magazines and anthologies here and abroad, including Best American Poetry, Poetry, The New Criterion, Sewanee Review, and The Hudson Review. He also offers one-on-one mentoring and coaching for businesses and groups interested in improving their spiritual awareness, listening, communication, writing, and presentation skills.
ADVANCE
PRAISE FOR
POETRY AS SPIRITUAL PRACTICE
“At the same time that Robert McDowell is teaching us to approach the
reading and writing of poems as acts of prayer in his brilliantly insightful
book, Poetry as Spiritual Practice, he is quietly doing another astonishing
thing: creating community. McDowell’s exercises at the end of each
chapter liberate poetry from a solitary contemplative practice to a collective
celebration of the sacred. I will share this book with everyone I love.”—Mirabai
Starr, author of new translations of Dark Night of the Soul by John
of the Cross and The Interior Castle and The Book of My Life by
Teresa of Avila
“Reading this lovely guide awakens in you a deeper appreciation for poetry and
messages of the Spirit. It communicates a poet’s soul—and helps you articulate
that deep place of truth for yourself.”—Caroline Myss, author of Entering
the Castle and Anatomy of the Spirit
“In the way that Rumi allowed us to touch the heart of our soul, Robert
McDowell—with a lyrical grace—shows you how to easily create poetry that can
propel your spiritual journey beyond normal reality into cherished mystic
realms.”—Denise Linn, author of Sacred Space and The Secret
Language of Signs
On Foot, In Flames (University of Pittsburgh Press,
2002), a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, is Robert McDowell’s third
full-length collection of poetry.
“Following a trajectory from apocalypse to redemption,
McDowell’s third collection invites readers to go “into the writing where
anything/Can happen.” On Foot, In Flames is filled with “a sweet
sighing/From the souls of trees” and “recollections of the days when
you/Surprised yourself with competence, even grace.” McDowell appeals to
grace in part as a response to violence, as in his depiction of working in a
tannery-”Stitched into gloves and apron,’Lye-spattered, soaked with
grease,/I feed my machine 1,200 hides a day./Sometimes I think this was the
neck, this the tail”-or in the blank-verse monologues that witness, among
other things, violence against women.”
— Publishers Weekly, May 27, 2002
“I am caught up again and again in McDowell’s strong narrative line.
Whether he is reshaping an old myth or detailing an actual event, this poet is
a storyteller at the top of his form.”
— Maxine Kumin, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
“On Foot, In Flames is filled with loneliness, with the knowledge that
‘the world dismantles us,’ but it’s also prayerful, its music an affirmation
that threads through even the narratives of violence and betrayal.”
—Kim Addonizio
“On the surface, these poems seem easy reveries, hymns to family and
farm, human yearnings toward God. But they are also an ambitious scrutiny of
these subjects, tough-minded and honest.”
— Chase Twichell
“McDowell’s long poems tell stories, and his short ones are vignettes
that pique the reader’s narrative imagination. His new poems constitute quite
an advance…Very impressive.”
—Ray Olson in Booklist, March 14, 2002
“Recommended!”
— Carol Muske-Dukes in Los Angeles Times, December 8, 2002
“McDowell’s language is sometimes heartbreakingly beautiful, his flow
as caressing as a cherished memory. True, the poems here are often redolent
with human loneliness, dangerously aware of the fragility of the human psyche.
But McDowell’s vision, his gift, transcends mere pathos. McDowell knows the
stories that form the lining of the human heart.”
— Dan Hays in the Statesman Journal (Salem, Oregon),
May 12, 2002
__________________________________________________________________
The Weekly Toast:
Went to dinner in Columbia, Maryland
at the house of your closest work-friend.
Her hubby, who spied for the CIA,
could be called “to duty” at any hour
and he could never tell her where.
She handed me a Miller’s High Life and told me
to loosen my tie. We had a strange
dinner of peanut-butter chicken and hand-
grenades (as her hubby called artichokes)
lovingly prepared by her slightly handi-capable
brother who had washed his hands slowly
singing “Happy Birthday to Me” three
times, twirling the Life Buoy in his mitts.
I once had a cocker-spaniel puppy for three days
who would not leave my side and who curled
upon my pillow at night and farted
in my face.
I woke often
to let him out.
I’d sit on the steps of the moonlight
as he chewed grass. I’d watch
my breath cloud above me.
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