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A selection from Gospel Earth is available:

Jeffery Beam. Gospel Earth. A Selection. Longhouse, 2006. First edition. Three color fold out booklet wrapped in Tibetan handmade paper with wrap-around band. An edition of 1 of 50 . New. $10 (unsigned) / $15 (signed) postpaid. Write Us To Order

The Light Begins First              settling dust among corn rows                         circling ravens holding the blue black funeral cars almost                         invisible Behind their wings behind the trees the hills pink fires spread slow contagion It was like this the first evening & one day in the future                                                 far which is also now
	Snake in the Garden Under dry maple shadow creeping cedar painting shadows greener hiding split darknesses under dissected leaves The ineffable awaits you Poised to bite Welcoming you
Revelation of Melancholy Despair in the elms Bitter             orange in the heart Four pigeons on                                      a limb One       flies off Now       all gone
	Revelation of Beginnings The cities pray but not for long Soon they will bend Wind Tall grass
Paradiso I go where feathers blow World
	In the Mimosa Tree Words came to me & oh they smelled peach but shaggy
Night Gospel Moon bronze cup
	Every Knee Must Bow Blue shade: trumpet vine obeisance to honey bee
Blesséd the Poor Having nothing This poem my net Errant dandelion
	To William Carlos Williams Dr. Williams it's not enough that your poems sting with innocence gaiety & passion Their forbearance in the face of human folly & strife pricks sweetly like the rose of which you so often wrote
Treatise of the Daisy For Daisy Thorp Luxuriant sun blooming on infertile ground ~ Day’s eye brighter for clouds breaking round it ~ Dusk: Fallen moon a thousand times on grass
	The Hummingbirds Twilight The male's throat fire & ruby prowess The female subtler Her light simpler Wings: earthquake flash in air
Tree Parable Rarity red                        tints sourwood leaf points Each cell a Spanish womb a dove burning to confession
	Thrush’s Parable Tree
Sermon Day lit shriek opening an awl in the sky owl
	Testimony Silence                         Fullness Wait!             Outside                         whippoorwill knowing no time
The Book of Nuthatch With a flick of             sunflower seed shell                                                       a cut - a thrust -             explaining                                                       itself to sun
	Mourning Dove Tame as love turning on coralline feet Scratching at mine First one then another pine straw’s resiliency strength Castle-in-the-making
Penitent Offering feathers to the moon won’t do nor lamps blueing grizzled sky
	Night Jar detonates the woods A hungry moth beats its face against a flower World’s heartbeat
The Orderly Processions No hearts with damaged values Nature’s                            intention: flight of wings
	William Morris's hand in the weather Acanthus leaves English oak leaves Tongues of fire on earth Ice patterns on glass
Nyssa sylvatica: Black gum For Moreton Neal Black-green leaves                         masking autumn oxblood to come Your shoulders urgent blushing                         as the heart beneath flushes:             all hues captive
	Headgame Coarse silk rubbing my brow Furrows & wind tunnels The door shuts twice
Winter Homage Black moss a bird's still eye my infinite room
	Lovers’ Wisdom Panting in grass beneath high air sun
Sacred Marriage Swaggering kisses along needled forehead terraces
	Baptism Red ash rains Your breath:                         articulate When light descends give sorrow a tender weeping a hair
Stranger in a Strange Land Bees sense crowshadow across dry pavement I am pilgrim on this vegetable earth
	Crucifix Robin wrestles worm into witch-hazel air Suddenly air serene still as mother’s milk
Mountain Bluebird Flint vein darts from roost Who among us has seen sart mountains damaged by fog but                                         that bird Angels blow liquid fire into that heart to waken its chortle Ellington blue note vibration
	Winter is the world, summer the other realm* Dirt dauber’s black iridescence drinking from cat water bowl Does love’s pain diminish or heighten this? *Gnostic Gospel of Philip
Fern Gospel Red ferns curling in dappled wood beyond
	God Comes To See Me God comes to see me Without Bell Never comes with Drum But shakes the Footings Of my House With Subtle Water's roar Listening at Crown of Day When Nothing has been said The Water takes my Breath away The Landscape's recompense
Commentary on Duende I thank you for this immense sulfurous melancholy Despite the sirocco the miracle happens
	Prunus mume Sutra Cid Corman 1924-2004 Cold March apricot air sun shines small upon new green leaves A moth last night porch light’s apricot "summertime" A few snowflakes fall apricot’s porcelain pink remains Word be with me name the apricot wordless He’s gone what new light in their blossoming
Letter to Meteor As if in this place giants once lived rocks redden at dawn                                        again at dusk Evening:                         strange light inarticulate Then             out of nowhere a grace             a valley bottom Bomb
	So the high pasture             tenders them tearing their scent             across the wide hill sky bending down             to meet them What is here             What bleating bell beneath mountain's green sun             What hoof print writing horns arched             locked in rhythm
Memoriam Robert Creeley 1926-2005 Beyond the old cornfield a train Fox looks up -- busy world I lift my bucket to the wintry stars Out falls emptiness & glass Mind bears it all away Somewhere order disorder ripe cherries & wine Which way to nowhere Spring sun shows the easy way Right up through the trees
	Secret Gospel The other world lord with his rain buckets splashing with his heart coming a wind with his translucent looks ravishing with his copper-ring circling his head with one river rising with one river emptying He keeps turning round the certain mountains Bringing me back My seaweed skirt shivering emerald So I can say the unsayable To live is to sleep Awakening the first longing at dream’s gate
Earth Gospel Expressive                           the world’s hills                           earth’s convincing boundaries Now sharp horizons Now gentle plains Holy groves                           abstract slender Eye travels up beyond dipping ridge to dwarfed valley below to our fated knowledge heavy with cicada song where strangers may pass & dark hate dissipates forever Reconcile hill to valley Reconcile intervening time Fall into clarity completeness
	Inner Light I have seen it when I remember to forget to look when I remember it is there with my back turned my heart towards it surf bringing up tarnished impossible boats through brackish waters & countless smooth pure sands
Resurrection What late fire-dragons fume from my body What purples What frosts The night tastes bitter Dawn’s moss on my tongue Beauty
	Helios Gospel Standing naked in the sun I am not like a wolf because I am the sun

Thank you, Bob & Susan Arnold of Longhouse, for hearing these gospels & taking them up. The late Cid Corman read & commented on some of these poems; my everlasting gratitude for his mindful & generous consideration. My affection to Phyllis Walsh of Hummingbird for her continued interest in & support of my little poems. Thanks also to Joe Massey who encouraged me to begin this collection, & to Josh Hockensmith whose own enthusiasms serve to remind me how much can be said with few words. A cadre of friends read & responded to this Gospel. I thank them for their criticism & witness: Bob Arnold, Cy Dillon, Janet Lembke, Ann McGarrell, Thomas Meyer, David Need, Ippy Patterson, David Preece, J. P. Seaton, & Marly Youmans.


Thank you to the editors who published these poems in their journals: "To William Carlos Williams", & "William Morris’s" – blink; "In Memoriam – Robert Creeley" – Conjunctions Web Forum; Parts 1 & 3 of "Treatise of the Daisy" appeared previously as part of a self-published broadside, Green Finch Keening no. 59, "A Day’s Eye for Daisy"; "The Light Begins", "Prunus mume Sutra", & "Testimony"– Hummingbird; "Winter Homage" appeared with the title "My Orange County Garden" part of "Musings for Late Autumn - Poems Small & Not So Small" a small anthology of my poems on The Jargon Society web site www.jargonbooks.com/jeffery_beam.html; "Treatise of the Daisy (Part three)" – Lilliput Review; "Penitent" & parts of the Creeley poem in a significantly different context appeared in South by Southeast: Haiku & Haiku Arts.

Jeffery Beam was born in 1953 & raised in Kannapolis, a feudal textile town in North Carolina. Beam is poetry editor of the print & online journal, Oyster Boy Review, & a botanical librarian at UNC-Chapel Hill. His award-winning works of poetry include Visions of Dame Kind (Jargon Society, 1995), An Elizabethan Bestiary Retold (Horse & Buggy, 1997), & The Fountain (NC Wesleyan College Press, 1992). His new & selected spoken word CD collection, What We Have Lost, was a 2003 Audio Publishers Association Award finalist. His art song collaboration "The Life of the Bee" with composer Lee Hoiby continues to be performed on the national & international stage. The songs & a recitation of the texts can be heard on Albany Record’s New Growth. Beam has a new book, The Beautiful Tendons, due next year from Off the Cuff Books, & he is searching for a publisher for his children’s books & for The Broken Flower: Poems. Among his current projects is the libretto for an opera based on the Persephone myth. Beam lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina with his partner of 26 years, Stanley Finch. You can read & hear more of his poetry at his website: www.unc.edu/~jeffbeam/index.html

~Jeffery Beam
Gospel Earth

Gospel Earth
Copyright © 2006 by Jeffery Beam


So minimal & so lush all at once, their titles become them. Their beauty is about the huge pleasure of omission, & the powerful delicacy of what stays. So what stays can never be sentimental. They are quite sublime. Sacramental. A collection to keep beside a bed. Where they might seep into the sleeping head like pearls.

~ Artist Ippy Patterson

[Jeffery Beam is] a pilgrim on this vegetable earth & in its feathered air. [He is] a thrush in a tree, [he] wrestles a worm, detonates the woods. [He is] the sun. I think [these poems are] numinous, as any gospel should be. [The] fractured freestyle encapsulates the random serendipities of the natural world. I am thrilled to see it inhabited by many birds as well as plants & insects. [He’s] right: "Nature's intention flight of birds." What I love most is the poems' connectedness to their subjects. [Jeffery Beam does] not see humankind as separate from all else but rather as an intrinsic part of creation sharing equally with moth, acanthus leaf, black gum, & nuthatch. Down with dominion! Here's to courting earth's acceptance.

~ Naturalist, classicist, essayist Janet Lemke.

There are poems here of extraordinary hush & beauty. I particularly like the ones in which arrangement & line-breaks break the syntax into another shape or made syntax strange. This opened out feelings or space within which to feel. The relationship between the force that made those separations or estrangements was not always equal to lyric flourishes, but I did not mind this, or rather, would not want this worked out, as it seemed to me that this unevenness was in its own way a rhythm of attention & grief / witness that was true. We are, alas, not completely constant in love.

~ Poet David Need

I am knocked out by their plain beauty.

~ Poet & translator Ann McGarrell

You have my favourite book by Jeffery Beam.

~ English poet, David Preece.

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A Woodburners We Recommend Publication Series 2006

As an act of goodwill and for poetry - Longhouse is sending out each month complete pusblications - online - of one poet (or more) we have published in booklet, broadside or postcard form for everyone to share. It's a way of giving back to many of you who have sent to us poems, letters, purchases and the same goodwill over the years. The series will fly in under the banner of our Woodburners We Recommend. It should also be felt as a certain warmth in memory to all our close and dear poetry comrades passed along - each one becoming more of a loss. Each monthly booklet will also be available for purchase from Longhouse. Issued in a very limited keepsake edition of 50 copies. Starting in 2006 we will begin to reissue and present past issues from Longhouse of select poets. For those readers that travel back as far as 1972 when Longhouse began, you know poetry was released like bandits by the day, by the week, by the month, and always free. We have never taken on grants and meant poetry to be seen & heard & on poetry terms. From 2006, into the Infinite, and within the universal cyber cosmos, we would like to share multiple poets with you....and only ask that you share them further.

~ New Arrivals to our Bookshop !

~Our Catalogs of Books - Poetry & More! for Sale

~ Cid Corman - The Next One Thousand Years

Home / About Longhouse / Books for Sale / Friends & Links / Contact Us/To Order / Write Us

 

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