Alison Hawthorne Deming's most recent book of poetry
is Genius Loci, which follows The Monarchs:
A Poem Sequence, and Science and Other Poems,
winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy
of American Poets.
She's also a teacher of nonfiction and writer
of nonfiction.
Her prose works include Writing the Sacred
into the Real, The Edges of the Civilized World,
and Temporary Homelands.
And Kore Press, I believe, has a few of her works
that she published with them in the lobby tonight.
Alison is also former director of the Poetry Center,
and an exemplary steward of the art.
Throughout her work, Alison Deming
is a celebrant of the natural world--
its mystery, its splendor, its fierceness, its frailty,
and its violent power.
As an advocate for its protection and conservation,
she is ultimately concerned with the place of humankind
within the world, natural and constructed.
In Writing the Sacred Into the Real,
she says, "I believe we owe nature
the deep sense of gratitude that people once
expressed to their gods.
The Earth's life is finite as is my own.
And these are realities I accept with sorrow.
The place and the passage made sacred by their limits."
In her most recent book of poems--
the spirit of place is rendered in its essence
as guardian spirit, and moments reverent and irreverent
in Deming's characteristic juxtaposition
of the body with the holy, moments of watching
and witness, transform into full bodied meditations that make
the seen and the unseen real.
The title sequence-- a remembrance of an homage
to the city of Prague calls us back to the lives
you never knew the beings of thoughts real as the realm
they inhabit.
"Regeneration of our inhabited realm
is possible within limits," Deming suggests,
"if humans guard its care."
Please welcome Alison Hawthorne Deming.
[APPLAUSE]