Aura Lifetime

Poetry. "AURA LIFETIME strips away detail to leave the faint glow around everything seeking to be known and named. Our own wounds and words provide a place for that light to emit and enter. 'Memory controls the occurrence,' as Thilleman writes in the poem Red Feather, and creates a distraction preventing the necessary loss or quieting of self it takes to hear another's words and the opportunity to gain fullness in the connection each word allows to see another's light or the dimming of our own... if not only the dimming of our own. In AURA LIFETIME we no longer need to name what is already known. What there is makes accessible the shared space between names, the pulse nothing we know is without, 'and in those hands love wore/ blows vision anew.'"—Tim Armentrout

"And then there's that great Duncan quote: 'It is not in the survival alone but in the death and life of themes that the alchemical process works.' So these poems are not aimed at a totality fixed and explainable in terms set out by reason's discourse. They exist in the moment of articulation, their 'themes' changeable one line to the next, a new thought introduced, counters or complements the previous line. And these are not final 'thoughts' but a tracing of the mind's movement, even 'intimations' than strict 'thoughts.' This is not narrative or even lyric poetry, though there is a strong element of the lyrical or even the elegiac: a loss that is productive, that leads to a sense of urgency. The poems 'see' not with the characteristic vision of the biological eye, but with the magical 'third eye' and so they do not conform to expectations of a reader concerned with a 'finished thought.' tt writes, 'This vast Real, inhabiting the great wheel of mortality and its attendant resurrection, emanates from love in our time—and only is it so from the duration of love in openness.' LOVE IS THE LAW, LOVE UNDER WILL. It really is a major work of great beauty and power."—Peter Valente