Bøger af Tim Amsden

In 1998 Tim and Lucia Amsden left their familiar lives in Kansas City and moved to the Ramah Valley in northwestern New Mexico, where they lived for the next two decades. Love Letter to Ramah recounts their experiences there, nestled among an eclectic and diverse community of loving, earth-rooted people. It is an evocation of the rich human and natural history permeating the area and of the importance--central to the traditional beliefs of Indigenous people--of living in concert with the living earth.Living in that place and within that community gave Tim and Lucia a profound and visceral understanding of our need to move the fragile blue marble of our earth back into balance. Just as important, it enhanced their awareness that we must shift ourselves into acknowledgement of and respect for our global community. It also gave them a firm belief that those things are indeed possible.

The poems in this remarkable collection, like the miscellaneous objects in the museum that inspired the book's arrangement, are as random--and as revealing--as life itself. As we turn the pages, we have a growing sense that every encounter with people, creatures, objects or events--whether personal or public, welcome or apprehensive, playful or serious--reveals more than itself: A voice keeps asking, Where am I in all this? That question soon becomes ours, as does the answer, though it remains unspoken until the book's final poem asks the question again and, in a voice expanding to include the whole earth and its inhabitants, even the angels, proclaims the answer in the soaring last lines of a communal hymn. -Bob Longoni served as Director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and is the author of Woodpiles Tim Amsden's Vanishing Point has wit and pathos, wisdom and delight. These poems show the heart of a man who cherishes life and is not afraid to open himself to the larger questions of who and why we are in this complicated world. He moves seamlessly from intimate memory to the tenderness of loving his wife, to sharing life's simple moments, the ones that sustain us. With humor and honesty, Amsden takes us on a journey through the rooms of his life, where "...in my center nests a sliver of grace." -Paula Sayword is the author of What Sleeps Inside and Canticle of Light and Dark