Bøger af Tim Sherry

Published by CIRQUE PRESS Holy Ghost Town is a remarkable book-length evocation of a very special place. In the genre of place writing, it compares to "Paterson" by William Carlos Williams. Whereas Williams focused on the city in the person, Sherry gives voice to the community in the person, the community that embraces its interrelatedness with the other-than-human world. I admire how these poems honor and enact grace, ecology, hilarity, and diversity. As they seek divinity, they do not shy from religious language and ritual. At the same time, the wisdom offered here tells us that sometimes we need to skip church and follow our feet into the woods where stillness, silence, and attention become prayers in the divine mystery of wilderness. --Derek Sheffield, author of Through the Second Skin .... Tim Sherry knows the perils of belief. Anyone who writes poems today about a wilderness Bible camp has already leaped well above the high bar for risk factor. Marry that to the occasional stubborn doubt, the nagging question, and you have a faith forged in gnarly fires, one that puts boot to both internal and external trails. Whether assessing his own god-like nature in a mirror or marveling at a girl whose t-shirt says Religion sucks sometimes too, in this paean to his beloved Holden Village and the wild lands that birthed it, Sherry keeps adjusting the scales as he seeks the sweet spot of balance. Don't let the plainspoken style of Holy Ghost Town deceive you. Its depths mirror Lake Chelan, the water he travels to access this remote Cascade retreat. Take the plunge. Come up cleansed, yes, but also with more chuckles than you have any right to expect. -- Peter Ludwin, author of Gone to Gold Mountain ..... In Holy Ghost Town, Tim Sherry tells the story of a place in the wilderness that is much more than beautiful landscape. In words clear and full of tenderness, he describes an abandoned mining town turned into a Lutheran retreat center that I and all who go there know as a place of reflection and transformation. Sometimes he puts words to what I have felt and couldn't express on my own. Other times he sheds light on something I have seen differently or not at all. It is poetry in which I can lose myself and find myself. Sherry's poetry reflects balance between faith and doubt, escape and reality, history and hyperbole, the serious and hilarious, that all who have been there know to be Holden Village, "a holy ghost town, a metaphor in the mountains." -- Elaine Harrison, assistant to the directors at Holden Village ..... The story of Holden Village told in Tim Sherry's Holy Ghost Town is one you might call serendipitous, though the visitors who come each year to the old mining town, now an ecumenical Christian retreat center in the north Cascades, know it as a place to shed worries, make room for peace of mind, marvel at the beauty of God's wilderness, and live the core values of the Holden community. It is a stirring history of the grand dreams, the love of wilderness, and faith in God that every morning herald a bright new day when one out hiking at Holden might imagine being "right at heaven's door" around the next bend in the trail. -- Marjorie Rommel, 2016-17 Auburn poet laureate

"It''s refreshing to read a poet who seems to have missed the postmodern memo about serial randomness being the mind''s great roadtrip. Instead, what we get is a boots-on-the-ground empathy from a real wanderer who has Richard Hugo''s eye for out-of-the-way topics and towns, a sincerity that doesn''t take selfies, a heart that can brake for a blue dress or blueberry patch. With a disarming candor, Sherry''s poems examine small moments which can ramify into large questions, humor, self-scrutiny, guilt, love, or praise. In the end, what the reader gets to examine is the ''archaeology of a life dedicated to the world.'' This book will remind you why you love poetry."         -Joseph Powell, author of The Slow Subtraction: ALS"In ''A David Hockney Landscape Poem,'' when Tim Sherry says, ''It is about the same, same thing-an effort to find a place to find meaning,'' he could as well be describing the rest of the poems in Pages of White Sky. Many of them are set in specific locations-the Chihuly Garden and Glass Collections Cafe, the Ephesus archaeological site, a farm truck hauling grain in in North Dakota, The Crescent City Lighthouse, a little britches rodeo in Halfway, Oregon-but the real terrain of this collection is always the landscape of the human spirit. These poems are windows left open to it, letting its meaning in." -Joe Green, founder of The Peasandcues Press and author of What Water Does at a Time Like This "Approaching like ponies fresh from summer fields, Tim Sherry''s poems, skittish and a little wild, transcend their domestication. His forte is deft renditions of the singular daily moments that make up a life. In a poem like ''I Am Not a Gary Soto,'' he redeems his admission of a strict religious upbringing by reminding us that the poetic moment is not necessarily dramatic, that sometimes the subtle implications of a father''s ''gray flannel suit'' is enough. Though they have fed on star shine and moon-brushed grasses, these works have been bred to carry us fast and far, and do so with grace." -Chris Dahl, author of Mrs. Dahl in the Season of Cub Scouts