“‘Generosity’ is the word that first comes to mind whenever I think of Philip Terman’s poetry. My Blossoming Everything may be his most magnanimous collection yet. The love in these poems, sometimes celebratory, sometimes sober, for a partner, for friends, for the Earth, for a fellow poet in Gaza, resounds with an expansiveness and exuberance that also elevates the reader. It’s a heart-true buoyancy many of us need right now, in music so lovely and so elemental it continues to sing even after you close these pages.” —Ann Pancake, author of Strange as This Weather Has Been
“Philip Terman’s My Blossoming Everything offers a poetry of pure lyric epigenetics—life after life surfaces and sails on and the reader feels the dreams of other bodies and history’s open skies.” —Stephen Kuusisto, author of Only Bread, Only Light
From the Publisher: “Philip Terman’s new collection embraces the multiplicity of the quotidian – what the philosopher/theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel calls ‘radical amazement.’ ‘Now all is quiet,’ the poet writes, ‘save for those sparrows and Neruda/who, too, is blossoming again, the way we all blossom,/even the dead stars, each and every particle of dust/says its testament.’ My Blossoming Everything evokes the largest poetic themes through the intimacy of personal memory and empathy. Ranging from personal narratives to pastoral lyrics to elegies to odes, braiding love and marriage, childhood and parenthood, friendship, the life of nature and the life of poetry, My Blossoming Everything is a testament to the moments of attention in which the world blossoms…”
More info About the Author: “Philip Terman’s books include This Crazy Devotion (Broadstone), Our Portion: New and Selected Poems (Autumn House) and, as co-translator, Tango Beneath a Narrow Ceiling: The Selected poems of Riad Saleh Hussein (Bitter Oleander). Forthcoming is The Whole Mishpocha: New and Selected Jewish Poems (BenYehuda Press). A selection of his poems, My Dear Friend Kafka (Nimwa Press, Damascus) was translated into Arabic by Saleh Razzouk.
His poems and essays appear in many journals and anthologies, such as Poetry Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Poetry International, The Sun, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish Poetry, and Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine.
He directs The Bridge Literary Arts Center, a regional writer’s organization in western, PA and conducts poetry workshops and coaches writing hither and yon…”
MY BLOSSOMING EVERYTHING
It is robins’ eggs on the just out-of-reach branch.
It is red raspberries in a circular thicket of thorns.
Who are you, my beloved? My sweetness,
My swallowtail, my infinite youth?
My pine shadow in the tall grass?
My other self, unreachable, my untrappable hummingbird,
My synagogue empty of all but God, my scripture
upon which I write my illegible inheritance,
My last night’s dream that woke me in confusion,
My wings removed in my mother’s womb,
My knowledge emptying with my age, my words
The silence will send out to the silence,
My light I cup in my hands and splash on my face,
My Jupiter newly risen like my heart?
To a Blossoming Apple Tree
Don’t tell me Isaiah was clear-headed,
that he had it planned out in advance
when he ordered us to turn our swords
into plowshares.
Don’t tell me Jesus spent weeks drafting
that mountain sermon song.
That robin isn’t studying any lexicon.
How long can we follow the movements of the bee
as it chases its hunger from apple blossom
to apple blossom, white and pink petals spinning
onto the field spread with mustard seed
and coltsfoot? And these words?
Can they offer an approximate portion
of their sweetness like these messages that float
and land on my notebook?
And so I strategize how to preserve them,
in this soft breeze, these swaying shadows,
these singing robins, that lone goose sneaking
through the stubble far from its natural waters,
in just this mid-morning light, under just this sky’s blue clarity,
ignoring, for now, the impossibilities,
the tragedy of the next page, the indecipherable hour,
the shadows lengthening, the air warming,
late morning evolving into early afternoon,
the wind brushing the fallen blossoms across
the shadow of the tree they floated from.
So what else to do with all this time
than to sit under this blossoming apple tree
and try to blossom myself?
From “On This Side of Time”
It is here we love, here we follow with reverence
the commandments of our one dream and good books.
How over a century ago the wise shaped a clearing
for love of learning and simple beauty and the future.
It will give sustenance to those who praise and celebrate
what the stuff of legends and the visions of the poets foretold.
For travelers it is a place of renewal. Listen
to the bells ringing for you to partake in a ceremony
filled with sacred food and stomping music and the continual dance.
Can you hear the joyful laughter in the celestial spheres?
Once there was a story told about a house such as this.
It was made of bread instead of brick and fed a multitude.
Children fell asleep to the soft winds and dreamed
of willows and water. There is no conclusion to the light.
Previously:
These poems are published here courtesy of the poet and publisher and should not be reprinted without permission.
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