The Chinese Poet Awakens
Poems by Jeff Daniel Marion


Illustrations by Elizabeth Ellison

The Chinese Poet Awakens looks at the life in East Tennessee through eyes of Eastern wisdom. Grounded in the regional, these poems have rooted deep, all the way to China. They wake us to a homeplace that is much bigger than we thought.
                 ---George Ella Lyon

He speaks with a glitter in his eye of friendship and community, legacy and loyalty. In these poems there are implicit salutes to Han Shan and St. Francis, and the long flowing beard of Walt Whitman; but the humor and humility, the romance and the elegy, the delight in flowers and place and seasons, are all Marion's own. The poems leave us with a sense of the fresh and the timeless.
                  ---Robert Morgan


"The Chinese Poet is a different sort of entity: he embodies not a point of view but a certain mood of acceptance, of willing acquiescence, of quietude and solitary thoughtfulness. . . . The Chinese Poet Awakens is a subtle book but no less forceful because of that. One puts it down with a sigh of regret and takes it up again with a smile of acceptance."
--Fred Chappell in Now & Then, 17 (1), Spring 2000, pp. 50-51.



Photo by Steven Marion

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From the book ---

The Chinese Poet Visits the Hermit's Cave with the Hope of Finding His Old Friend

  I have come the long way around,
  down by the river road
  where the herons stirred and rose
  at my approach

  They seemed to melt
  into this morning's mist.

  Now I climb your stone steps
  and find at my feet patches
  of bloodroot, their white petals
  brief as March snow.

  O how foolish I am!
  You are gone, too, river hermit.

  It was not your flute I heard
  across the ridge, only my friend
  the wind whistling his solitary note.
   

  
The Chinese Poet Awakens
by Jeff Daniel Marion, Wind Publications 1999, 56 pages, $12.50 softcover, $35.00 limited edition hardcover. (
illustrations by Elizabeth Ellison)
 

Wind Publications
600 Overbrook Dr
Nicholasville, KY 40356