Ruin and Beauty: New and Selected Poems

(Paperback)

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Poetry arises from the search for sacred language that describes the awe and mystery of the real world. Deena Metzger is a contemporary poet who has aligned herself with this ancient tradition. This collection, that includes selections from her earlier books of poetry, Dark Milk, The Axis Mundi Poems, Looking For the Faces of God, A Sabbath Amon

Reviews

Deena Metzger has spent a life in fierce devotion to the words and action that cut through to where spirit still resides in the ruins of our shattered world. In RUIN AND BEAUTY, Deena gifts us with poems that serve as life preservers. This is a singular vision honed over a lifetime of devotion to words and action, love and wisdom. I can imagine seekers carrying this book five centuries from now and reciting these poems, much as we do Kabir and Rumi and Hafiz, to keep the spirit alive under daunting conditions.

- Edward Tick
Author, WAR AND THE SOUL
Founder/Director Soldier's Heart

This extraordinary collection of poems is written by a woman who has spent a lifetime travelling to the center of the unconscious. Deena Metzger enters the darkest of moments and always comes back singing. She is teacher and healer, she is both guide and woman warrior.

Ruin and Beauty is an extraordinary book. Here, Metzger listens to animals, trees, rocks, oceans--she has learned their language well. She converses with other poets. She walks with sorrow and joy as companions, over deserts, through thickets, woods, and fields.

I am awestruck by what she knows. This is a prayerbook, a long letter to the gods, a secret conversation with the animal kingdom. She is trying to save us all. The passion in these poems burns holes in my mind. Metzger opens the door through which a multitude can enter. If you follow her, you will be changed by this journey, but you will learn many secrets of the universe, and perhaps you will find hope for the future as well.

- Judith Minty

You will be surprised. Deena's Metzger's poetry is well known in California, but it ought to be known throughout the world. And hopefully now with this extraordinary volume it will be. Here are beautiful poems, nuanced and yet in their own way, ferociously truthful, with a wonderful music, both plain speaking and spell binding. I recommend this magic. If as a poet I have long believed that poetry can save the world, what I want to say now is: this poetry can save the world.

- Susan Griffin. Author of Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy and A Chorus of Stones

"Did you think The Presence would fail to leave a scar" asks Deena Metzger in RUIN AND BEAUTY. She's a poet of visionary questions: "Can the world/heal/in this body" And the stakes she plays for are high. Her new and much-anticipated book is tense with numinous presences: Neruda, Georg Trakl, the Chumash. But the arc is Metzger's alone: the hard-won serenity and desperations of an exemplary life. She's a poet who has faced contingency and lives in a world of final things--a deeply earned knowledge underpins this book, "that we should be met this way/that our appetitite/should be rewarded/with such grace....'

- Dennis Nurkse

This collection is as much a gathering of souls as it is an array of soft and dazzling poems. Deena Metzger is a sentinel against silence, reminding us with each offering how blessed we are to be able to die of beauty, how we can have rain in the midst of the rubble, how to have rain and begin again.

- Ariel Dorfman

To what the poet witnesses, Deena Metzger adds nothing but the light of her imagination, whose like has not visited the West since Lawrence encountered snakes there. In her, imagination is the practice of holy recognition of each thing she observes and the act of discovering and communicating the hidden order of things.

- Marc Kaminsky

Author Bio

Deena Metzger is a poet, novelist, essayist, storyteller, teacher, healer and medicine woman who has taught and counseled for over forty years. She is the author of many books, including most recently, From Grief into Vision: A Council (Hand to Hand, 2007); Doors: A fiction for Jazz Horn (Red Hen Press, 2005); The Other Hand (Red Hen Press, 2000); and Tree: Essays and Pieces (North Atlantic Books, 1997).