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Cranberry Smoke is a 13-year
poem peregrination through the 351 towns and cities that constitute
the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and out of which evolved
365 poems.
In sharing in the author's view
of the human experience: essentially affirmative, the reader
of Cranberry Smoke is given the opportunity to explore subjects
that are universal to all: love, death, suffering, humor,
religious spirituality, sexual energy, compassion, etc., and
to gather insights via motifs of landscape, nature and its
elements, people types, etc.
The poems presented in Cranberry
Smoke are largely Whitmanesque in that concentration is on
natural speech patterns. However, syllabic meter does make
an appearance, and technical vehicles of rhyme and alliteration
appear too: are utilized to afford sound responses for enhancing
entertainment and/or meaning. The poems in Cranberry Smoke
are not about the 351 towns and cities in Massachusetts, in
an historical sense, although tinges of the historical spirit
do appear occasionally. The poems are a response to pulsations,
abstracted from a locale within each of these communities.
The locale chosen was determined by way of an image(s), or
by a cluster of images to which the author responded with
emotional and mental intensity.
The poems in Cranberry Smoke
are "white-powdered pastries of thought/soft and warm and
dreamy sentiments/the bright-dark maroon of my being." [taken
from "Chimney Sigh" in Cranberry Smoke]
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