Synopsis
Reminiscent of Eastern Bhakti love poetry, and Western Troubadour and Green Man traditions, Verdant recounts a mid-life passage within a shadowed natural landscape of intense physical and spiritual longing. At the age of 42, queer poet Jeffery Beam fell in love with a younger man, threatening his then 15-year relationship. These poems were born of that spiritual alchemical blaze, and its substantial healing power. The poet-lover's sacred quest through heartbreak, suffering, grief, and regret, progresses ultimately to a joyful ecstatic reunion with the Beloved Divine. A mini-essay, "Don't Forget Love: Sacred Longing's Dark Project," further illuminates the actual, mythological, and spiritual origins of the poems, and describes the poet's lifetime search through experience, teachings, and literature, to a condition in which Desire and Love enrich instead of subsume the Self.
About the Author
Jeffery Beam's over twenty award-winning works include The Broken Flower, Gospel Earth, Visions of Dame Kind, An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold (with artist Ippy Patterson), The New Beautiful Tendons: Collected Queer Poems 1969-2012, and The Fountain. His spoken word CD with multimedia What We Have Lost: New and Selected Poems 1977-2001 was a 2003 Audio Publishers Award finalist. Jonathan Williams: Lord of Orchards a book of essays, images, and shouts about Beam's mentor, poet and founder of The Jargon Society press, was published in late 2017. The song cycle, Life of the Bee (composer Lee Hobby) continues to be performed on the international stage. The Carnegie Hall premiere with the songs and a Beam reading can be heard on Albany Record's New Growth. Composer Steven Sera premiered the cantata Heaven's Birds: Lament and Song, using three poems from The Tendons, on Boston's World AIDS Day 2008. His tone poem, "An Invocation," inspired by the introductory poem in Beam's book Gospel Earth, premiered in 2016 with the Austin Symphony. In July 2016, Serpa premiered in Austin a song cycle, The Creatures: A Bestiary Retold, based on eight poems from Beam's Bestiary book. Holt McCarley premiered (2015) an instrumental piece, "The Hyena," in St. Louis from the Bestiary. 2015 saw the UNC-Chapel Hill premier of Family Secrets, a Daniel Thomas Davis song cycle commissioned by soprano Andrea Edith Moore, with Beam's "Porch Song," and texts by other North Carolina authors Allan Gurganus, Randall Kenan, Frances Mayes, Michael Malone, Lee Smith, and Daniel Wallace. North Carolina Opera premiered a re-staging of this work in 2018. A CD recording is now available through Albany Records. Composer Tony Solitro continues to compose works based on Beam's poems. Up to now they are: "Love's Astronomy" for voice and piano (2018) from The New Beautiful Tendons which appears on Michelle Murray Fiertek and Michael Korman's CD Every Tiny Thing (2012) from Albany Records; "sharp horizons-gentle plains" for clarinet, violin, and piano (2019), inspired by the poem "Earth Gospel" in Gospel Earth; and "A Stone Falling, A Falling Stone," for soprano and piano, from the book The Broken Flower which premiered in 2020 as part of the American Opera Project First Glimpse. Composer Frank E. Warren is currently working on a song cycle tentatively entitled Garden of Flowers. In 2023, Andrea Edith Moore will present, in celebration of Beam's 70th birthday, a concert program featuring selections from the many musical works inspired by Beam's poems, as well as some of Beam's own musical creations. Kin Press published Beam's last book, Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements, a poetry/painting collaboration, with Welsh painter Clive Hicks-Jenkins. An accompanying CD recording of the poems, including Beam's new "antique" ballad, "Pale Horse," performed with folk-singer Mary Rocap, is available upon request from the author. On-going projects include two illustrated children's books The Droods and a collection of winter lullabies; A Traveller of Thee: A Poet's Commonplace Book of Poetry and the Spirit; as well as an anthology of bee poetry, folklore and science throughout time, Bee, I'm Expecting You. Beam is poetry editor emeritus of the print and online literary journal Oyster Boy Review. He lives at Golgonooza at Frog Level, Hillsborough, North Carolina with his husband of 42 years, Stanley Finch. He retired in late 2011 from many decades as a UNC-Chapel Hill botanical librarian. You can learn more about Beam, and read and hear more of his poetry at his website: jefferybeam.com
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