Carved Like Runes: Poems

This collection of poems reads like one poem, a rich, complex set of wise meditations. With courage, vulnerability, and wit, Jan Bowman celebrates creation, probes the aching of age, and wonders at the "shining" of grief. She renders the ordinary and the extraordinary beauty and bounty of life—with all its griefs, graces, and glories—into words that touch the heart, and the spirit, and illuminate the longing of us all. She captures our very personal and the very universal life experiences.

Jan Bowman is Professor Emeritus of English at California Lutheran University. She is an immigrant daughter, a wife, a mother, and a grandmother. She grew up in the Midwest where she began writing poetry at Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois. She, and her family, moved to California in 1969.