My Blossoming Everything

Philip Terman

Book cover for My Blossoming Everything
Book cover for My Blossoming Everything

My Blossoming Everything

My Blossoming Everything

Philip Terman

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Description

Philip Terman's new collection, My Blossoming Everything, embraces the multiplicity of the quotidian - what the philosopher/theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel calls "radical amazement." "Now all is quiet," the poet writes, "save for those sparrows and Neruda/who, too, is blossoming again, the way we all blossom, /even the dead stars, each and every particle of dust/says its testament." My Blossoming Everything evokes the largest poetic themes through the intimacy of personal memory and empathy. Ranging from personal narratives to pastoral lyrics to elegies to odes, braiding love and marriage, childhood and parenthood, friendship, the life of nature and the life of poetry, My Blossoming Everything is a testament to the moments of attention in which the world blossoms.


Critical Reviews

"'Generosity' is the word that first comes to mind whenever I think of Philip Terman's poetry. My Blossoming Everything may be his most magnanimous collection yet. The love in these poems, sometimes celebratory, sometimes sober, for a partner, for friends, for the Earth, for a fellow poet in Gaza, resounds with an expansiveness and exuberance that also elevates the reader. It's a heart-true buoyancy many of us need right now, in music so lovely and so elemental it continues to sing even after you close these pages."

-Ann Pancake, author of Strange as This Weather Has Been


"My Blossoming Everything is about a man moving through the world singing. He walks along the Clarion River close to his home, describing the steady green murmur beyond the virgin pine, aware of the deer, elk, bear, wolf, panther and wild turkey, as well as the horrendous destruction of fracking. Frogs urge repentance. Dragonflies are the resurrections of the poet ancestors, and the answer to every question is Hummingbird. The poet's voice is sometimes that of a prophet, sometimes a gardener or father or teacher. Children fall asleep to the sound of soft winds, dreaming of willows and water. The light is never ending. James Wright sits at the feast beside the prophet Ezekiel, Whitman next to Homer, and Mahmoud Darwish and Yehuda Amichai speak softly to each other as they break bread."

-Michael Simms, author of Strange Meadowlark


"Philip Terman's My Blossoming Everything offers a poetry of pure lyric epigenetics-life after life surfaces and sails on and the reader feels the dreams of other bodies and history's open skies."

-Stephen Kuusisto, author of Only Bread, Only Light


Publishing Information

Publisher: Saddle Road Press
Pub date: 2024-07-08
Length: 156 pages

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