Mysteriosos and Other Poems

Mysteriosos and Other Poems, Michael McClure’s newest book of poetry, explores the last seven years. These new poems speak of working toward freedom and beauty during a time of interminable war and the destruction of our natural surroundings. In the Introduction, McClure clarifies his playfulness with time, how within the moment of his writing all moments and memories exist. His “willingness of unwearied senses to be what they perceive” as Anne Waldman says, opens our perceptions. Included in this new collection is: a long travel poem to an Indian forest where an enraged elephant charges then recognizes an old human friend and turns back into the trees; “Double Moire” which “reads like a fulfillment of Goethe’s prophesy and Shelley’s: the whole universe seems to be in it, down to the smallest and up to the most vast. It is absolutely what the ultimate nature poem might be” (Jerome Rothenberg). The poems against war are fierce and canny while the “Mysteriosos” and “Cameos” can be as gentle as lullabies inventing love. “Dear Being,” a garland of thirty-seven stanzas, uses the freedoms of Buddhist hwa yen.