Seeds of Fate (Paperback)

Paperback. The nearly 100 poems gathered in this volume were written in the spring of 1997-a season of solitude, longing, despair, and quiet revelation.They are the work of a poet who has found his voice and settled into it with ease, using his pen to tell us what poetry can do, and what it cannot. At the center of this collection lies a single question: How does one live with one's fate? Not as a passive recipient of a predetermined script, but as one who sows, tends, and sometimes neglects the seeds that fate has placed within. The title, Seeds of Fate, is drawn from a poem that asks whether the seedlings we plant with our own hands are any different from those that grow wild-and whether, in the end, we are anything more than the names we bear, chosen for us by others, forgotten by time. These poems move between the grand and the intimate. They speak of love in its many forms-the aching, unrequited kind; the tender, ordinary kind; the kind that consumes and the kind that consoles. They wrestle with solitude, not as a condition to be overcome, but as a monarch whose kingdom must be inhabited with dignity. They walk through seas of rapeseed flowers, pause at the ruins of Banpo, sit in a dim room while a mother warns against the dangers of money, and watch a sullen hunter in a village marry a pretty widow. There are poems here that engage with philosophy, language, and history-with the "spectacles of knowledge" through which we see the world, and the "masks of words" that both reveal and conceal. There are poems that try to understand time, not as an abstract concept, but as the very substance of a life lived in seconds and years. And there are poems that ask, simply, what poetry is-and whether it can save us. If there is a single thread that runs through all of them, it is this: that life, in all its brokenness and beauty, is worth singing about. Not because singing will mend what is broken, but because the act of singing is itself a way of dwelling in the world-a way of saying, I am here, and this is what it feels like This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. …