Bøger af Laura Lehew

Poems by Ayelet Amity, Jose Araguz, Shawn T. Boyle, Marie Buckley, Kathleen Cain, Laura Gamache, Quinton Hallett, Marilyn Johnston, Susan Kenyon, J.I. Kleinberg Laura LeHew, Ellaraine Lockie, Cheryl Loetscher, Catherine McGuire, Rick McMonagle, Amy Miller, Nancy Carol Moody, Sharon Lask Munson, Marisa Peterson, Tim Pfau, Kathryn Ridall, Kit Siebert, Bonnita Stahlberg, Charles F. Thielman, Caitlin Walsh

The Love Songs of Ephram Pratt came about as a result of my meeting Ephram Pratt some ten years ago.I first met Ephram in a poem in 2008; I didn't know him previously & he is not related to a minor historical figure I've since encountered on the Internet. He is, in all likelihood, of the Tribe of Ephraim in the book of Numbers, and I also suppose he may be an alter-ego or doppelgänger of mine who talks and writes about things I may feel somewhat reluctant or uncomfortable in dealing with in my poems. Since meeting him, we have shared in writing some 800 of our "Songs of Ephram Pratt." Although I have been writing seriously since the late 1950s, the past several years, Ephram seems have monopolized the bulk of my writing time.Ephram and I deal with subjects about which neither of us knows much of anything, as well as subjects on which one or both of us know a lot. We love to play with words and at times we love big long words that we just love to loll around on our tongues. We love to read them aloud, although I do most of the reading and Ephram just listens.There are often times we write poems we don't know anything about, much less what they mean or understand them. Dali says, "The fact I myself do not understand what my paintings mean while I am painting them does not imply that they are meaningless." Ephram and I strongly agree with Dali, that just because we do not understand what our poems mean, it doesn't mean they are meaningless.We believe in stream of consciousness, Kerouac's spontaneous prose and the dream world of Andre Breton's automatic writing.

Patti intended this collection to be a collage of relationships-those that went awry, or ended too soon, or where the two lovers involved were not well-matched in their dedication or devotion to the relationship. She wrote these poems as a catharsis, an exorcism, a healing. They are interwoven with the seasons and nature, to show the passage of time and how these affairs of the heart started, progressed, and broken down, and how they colored and affected other aspects of the poet's life. Her intention is to celebrate the finding of love and the spark of desire, and to acknowledge the ways in which, despite our best intentions, we sometimes fall short of love; how longing for an other is often a longing for something inside ourselves which we haven't yet discovered, and how a lover is often a mirror for that strength or gift inside us. In many of these pieces is the poet's desire to "get it right" and I wanted to express that maybe just the risk of loving another, and being loved--sometimes not in the ways the poet had wanted or expected, but with a willingness to go for a wild ride, regardless of where it ended--is in itself "getting it right." For the poet, these relationships were indeed a wild ride, and she invites the reader to come along, in the experience of these poems.