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The Arrow Maker
by D. M. Black
In The Arrow Maker, D.M. Black's sensitive attention to emotional states of mind, sometimes his own, sometimes those of others such as St. Augustine, Ezra Pound, Paul Celan or Jacques Brel, also extends to more public themes of war and climate change. As always, his forms are various, but there is a predominance now of poems spoken in a thinking voice that remembers the iambic pentameter without being subdued by it. In a final section, versions of two Dante cantos, from the Purgatorio and Paradiso, focus in particular on Dante's qualities of thoughtfulness and intellectual precision.
The Arrow Maker takes us to a place where the ordinary bumps up against the transcendental — sometimes uncomfortably, often as illumination. Many of the poems are deeply serious explorations, having their sights on a wide spiritual horizon, while at the same time treating the small particulars of the world with humanity and a love of 'things being various'. One sometimes feels that the act of writing the poem is an essential part of the process of spiritual inquiry. At other times, linguistic verve produces poems full of playful humour.
The idea of the philosophical poem might conjure up the spectre of something daunting or impenetrable. Nothing could be further from the truth in these clear-sighted poems, which survey the outer world and the complexities of the inner world with a gravity and panache that is utterly captivating. Their seriousness is undeniable, but so, too, is their humour, lightness of touch and their generosity towards the reader. D. M. Black has an infallible ear for the music of a line, and at their best they succeed, as Yeats put it, in holding justice and reality together in a single thought.
ISBN pbk 978-1910345-21-4
ISBN hbk 978-1910345-22-1
88 pages
Published January 2017
