Anthology Poet Highlight 1/82: Doug Talley, “Finding Place”
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(My reading of “Finding Place”)
From my preface to Fire in the Pasture:
Doug Talley’s poem, “Finding Place,” . . . speaks to the intersection of religious, spiritual, and moral experience with the aesthetic experience inherent in well-crafted poetry. Through metaphors we often use to describe and to connect with God’s kingdom (fire and light, the serpent, wind, gardens, planting, reaping, etc.) the poet takes up language as a form of worship—by which I mean that he uses it, yes, to praise God, but also to emulate God, whose words make worlds out of chaotic matter. If we think of poetry in etymological terms—poesis being the Greek term for the process of making—God, then, is the first Poet. His words and His worlds are constantly inviting us to reconsider our relationship to Him, to language, to the universe. Talley echoes this in ‘Finding Place’ as he drops words like live coals on our tongues and invites us to “[s]imply consider.”
The title Fire in the Pasture is intended to invoke these associations—and more.
Doug’s collection, Adam’s Dream: Poems for a Latter Day, was recently published by Parables. It’s a good-un. As poet and poetry editor Jim Richards says, “Outcasts of Eden will find the garden again in Adam’s Dream.” But more on that another day…