|
About the Author:
John Laue, a native of New Jersey, won the Ina Coolbrith Poetry Award at the University of California, Berkeley, and was Editor of Transfer, San Francisco State’s literary Magazine, and Associate Editor of the national literary journal San Francisco Review. He is the author of three books of poetry. In 1997, Laue won the Poetry World contest sponsored by Chatfield Software and published the chapbook Paradises Lost (Northstar Press). His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, anthologies, and a poetry textbook, Snapshots of Planet Earth, published by Oxford University Press.. The anthology Grow Old Along With Me (Papier Mache Press), released as an audiotape read by Ed Asner and Ellen Burstyn, was one of five finalists for 1997's spoken word Grammy Award, won by Hillary Clinton. Since retiring from teaching in 1992, he has been a coordinator of the National Writers Union Reading Series in Carmel, California, and of Local 7's yearly national poetry contest. Recently he became Advisory Editor of the new journal, The Monterey Poetry Review. In addition to poetry, his main interest is mental health. Laue has served as co-chair of the Santa Cruz County Local Mental Health Board; presently he serves on the Board of the Mental Health Clients’ Action Network (MHCAN). Recently he won an essay contest sponsored by Outsider Press, which will soon publish his memoir, My Mother and Me. |
FutureCycle Press is pleased to announce publication of Colma (including City of the Dead and Elegy for Skeptics). For more information about the author and a sample from the book, see below.
Please support American poetry and order your copy today! All sales revenues go directly to the support of this press.
From the Book:
Yet perhaps we could sing with some assurance
that with or without glib promises of heaven,
we all become as children
under the eyelids of our nights;
that we now can reach past far horizons,
letting our sweet and bitter anthems flow,
as everywhere, with swift, consistent rhythms
dark precisely balances light.
Comments on the Work:
In Colma, John Laue embarks on an inner journey, both “to better know” himself and to find peace within his “questing brain.” He sifts Colma’s landscapes, winnows its terrain, trying to confront the city’s “mute finality,” trying to come to terms with the “inescapable net” of death. In exploring the above-ground world of the living and the grave-bound world of decomposing flesh, the poet is torn between images of chaos and images of order, between the cyclical world of nature and the rigid world of the mind, until a voice inside him advises to “Forget the fallow dead./You have another life to live.” Then, the “grave” of his mind opens to the natural cycle of death and life. Although we may not share Laue’s experience of having worked in a city of the dead, we do, through the force of his poetry, share in his journey, these poems well-kept pathways to understanding.
—Elliott Ruchowitz-Roberts
Mr. Laue opens a cemetery gate and guides us through Colma with vivid description and fascinating details of the many cultural communities within the city of the dead. As one who knows his subject well, he writes with both humor and dignity. As I ended this collection of poems, I felt closer to the great mysteries of life and death and understood better the reverence with which we mourn for those who lived and loved before us, those who created the foundation for our own lives.
—Bernice Rendrick
In this small and extraordinarily poignant collection of poems, John Laue masterfully calls upon each one of us to examine not just our relationship to those who have passed before us, but—more importantly—our relationship to our own lives. He shows us with clarity and confidence how even among the cemeteries of Colma where “the poor lie tended” and “the grass is watered by tears,” honeybees in their proper season, nonetheless, “enter every hollow blossoming/fertilizing, scraping pollened knees.” He assures us of an eternal “law of energy:/endings always mean beginnings,” and reminds us of the verities and cycles through which our own lives will ultimately pass, calling upon each of us to remember, “you have another life to live/a little movement bolstered by your bones./One small cycle, but it is your own.” In that regard, Colma is most assuredly a precious collection for the living and a poetic call from Laue’s “city of crystal” for all of us to remember, in the time we have, to be alive.
—George Lober |