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A Preacher's Copyright © 2009 by Mike Young
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Book review: Click here for Click here
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Letter from
a Reader Dear
Mike, It
is Monday on board the ship Millennium. We have just exited Doubtful
Sound, New Zealand and are entering the open Tasmanian Sea for a few
hours. I have finished reading A Preacher’s Poems and wanted to tell you
my experiences with it. Bear with me. It will take some telling. I
slipped your little volume into my luggage intending it to be the very
first thing I would open when a deck chair became available on the first
day of open sailing. But I couldn’t wait so I was sneaking peeks at it
in the airport and on the airplane. Occasionally I had to turn to my
traveling companion, my sister Monica, and say “Monica, listen to
this.” She would agree with me that whatever I had just read to her was
very sensitive or profound. Just
as we boarded the ship Monica developed an awful head cold so for the next
two days she barely left her bed, sleeping, waking to take some sustenance
then sleeping again. After several days, she was still in bed; feeling not
tired enough to sleep right then but having no ambition to hold her own
book or magazine. I offered to read to her and asked what she would like
it to be. She said, “I would like you to read your friend’s poems to
me.” So
for the next hour or so I read your book to us both, to the end of the
poems section. Several times she would say, in her softened laryngitus
voice, “please read that part again” and we would both agree that that
was a particularly powerful or beautiful sentence or section. Once, on a
particularly lengthy stretch of words, when I failed to get the rhythm or
intonation just right she stopped me and said shouldn’t it be
“................,’ getting every single word in exactly the right
order with exactly the correct phrasing. I said “God damn it, Monica,
you are REALLY listening.” My
point in relating this is to show you how engaged we were with your
beautiful book. There are so many corners of pages turned down to places I
want to be sure to return to, it looks quite well worn on the very first
reading. But to return to Monica: when I put the book down and we were
both digesting, to use an incorrect metaphor, what we had just finished
experiencing, she said, “That man is a terrific poet” and a little
later she said “You should ask him if you could read and record those
poems. You read them really well and I think there might be a wider
audience for them in spoken word in this electronic age.’’ I
love your book. I love the title, the front cover, the back cover, the
size and the way it feels in the hand. I am not through reading it, which
requires more returns to those turned down pages, otherwise I would be
tempted to leave it in the ship’s library to let some other poetry lover
enjoy it contents. With
great affection, Karla Jones www.praxisontheweb.com Tel (610) 524-0304 Fax
(610) 436-4836 Copyright 2009 by Praxis
International, Inc. |