Mythologies of the Wild of God

"Nature and godhead twin and twine like ivy climbing silver beech in this book of poems. At home in the woods and fields near his Michigan farm, Michael Martin takes that rich sensorium as launchpad for interior journeying any and everywhere. He calls one poem 'The Between,' and we most often find ourselves in that liminal zone where sense passes into spirit in its full panoply of forms: Blue God, Centaur, Crane Maiden. Precariously balanced between unquenchable grief and glorious plenitude, between haunting ghosts and visions of the Beloved, Martin transports us to worlds that-magical and mundane-we come to recognize as our own. Such imaginative power is both artistry and blessing." --DANIEL J. POLIKOFF, author of In the Image of Orpheus: Rilke: A Soul History 

 "If the mesmerizing shield that Hephaestus forges in the Iliad-a panoply of cosmos, earthly calendrical rhythms, reaping and sowing, dance and grief, battle and harmony, and a holy devotion to creation-could be translated into a 21st-century collection of American poetry, it would be Michael Martin's Mythologies of the Wild of God. Martin guides us to recognize our impoverished world as quietly ablaze with symbol and ritual, where even a single tree is a 'palimpsest of the vanished wild, a talisman.' The poems sing with human touch and cultivation, with barn coats and honing stones, with planting and prayer, with Michigan farmland and Detroit boulevards. The ancient god's city at war is here, too; the fight takes place on the field of mortal souls and otherworldly spirits; and while it is ongoing, Martin's poems give us solace and strength to meet it, remembering we inhabit terrains ever replenished with grace, where 'pollen-heavy catkins hang like green christs in the breeze.' This is a collection to return us to ourselves, in sorrows and glories, 'as sweet and as wounded / as life,' as only poetry can." --KATIE HARTSOCK, author of Wolf Trees

ï»"I love these poems: pungent, swift, unexpected-they've all been baked in the same oven, but are very different loaves. Martin hurls us into sorrow and wonder; into the difficulty of living and the everyday raptures falling always around us." --MARTIN SHAW, author of Bardskull