AVAILABLE NOW FROM ELK RIVER BOOKS
and FOOTHILLS PUBLISHING
Booksellers, Event Organizers & Media: Promo One-Sheet Here
“These Creatures of a Day is a talisman against the mundane. It is a spell book for enchanting wild people, places, and beings with understanding, attention, reverence. Beaudin is one of our finest nature poets, and his writing—pure, authentic, and timely—is a call to humanity, a nod to ancestors, and a pure joy to read.”
—CMarie Fuhrman, author of Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems, and co-editor of Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, and Poetry and Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations
Coming April, 2024 from Foothills Publishing, this collection of 56 new poems from the author of Life List and Vagabond Song: Neo-Haibun from the Peregrine Journals, is “proof of a hard-won exploration, the footprints of a guy who’s been to the edge and made it back more or less in one piece, the precise, closely observed reflections of a human heart, as Faulkner said, in conflict with itself” (Allen Morris Jones, author of Mumblecusser and Other Poems).
ὢ πόποι, οἷον δή νυ θεοὺς βροτοὶ αἰτιόωνται:
ἐξ ἡμέων γάρ φασι κάκ’ ἔμμεναι, οἱ δὲ καὶ αὐτοὶ
σφῇσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὑπὲρ μόρον ἄλγε’ ἔχουσιν
–Homer, The Odyssey“It vexes me to see how mean are these creatures of a day towards us Gods,
when they charge against us the evils (far beyond our worst dooming)
which their own exceeding wantonness has heaped upon themselves.”
[T.E. Lawrence translation]
[As a further nod to Homer, I’ll be embarking on the Sailing the Wine-dark Sea Tour, leaving port on April 25 at Elk River Books]
Ink
Brown grasses laid flat
by still departing snow
heavy silence of gray
pierced only by voices of birds
Ravens & sandhills &
a single chickadee from somewhere
in the mystery of a cottonwood
From one of its fallen limbs
I watch a drift boat ease past
bundled man in the bow
plying the near shore for trout
that might not still exist –
if not this spring, then one
sometime soon
I allow the cold to creep
like a hunting heron deep
into my bones – return to the car
hoping this pen still has some ink
Like fish & birds
like another spring
ink is a growing uncertainty
“In defiance of the darkness of our time, These Creatures of a Day left me feeling that a shock of hope could smite me from any direction around life’s next blind corner.”
– David James Duncan, author of The River Why, The Brothers K, and Sun House
“Following the Music” interview in The Livingston Enterprise
Marc Beaudin 