Franciscan Notes - by Alan Williamson (Paperback)

About the Book

Spanning spiritual experience and a spot of the ecstatic, these poems respond to the great Rinzai Zen question, "If you cannot endure this moment, what can you endure?"

Book Synopsis

The book begins with deaths: chiefly the poet's mother's, but also those of cherished mentors and friends. Poems explore living beyond those deaths and approaching old age, and then do some traveling. Williamson takes a pilgrimage to Japan and India, inspired by his practice of Zen meditation, and placed under the aegis of a saying from the great Rinzai Zen monastery at Daitoku-ji: "If you cannot endure this moment, what can you endure?" A theme then becomes enduring the public moment, with all its griefs and opportunities for growth. The reader is then transported with the poet to Italy. In 2000, Williamson began visiting Tuscany regularly, and eventually became a property owner there. The poems set in Italy dwell on an encounter with old culture, and its potential to encourage both resignation and mysticism, with moods that persist from the tutelary geniuses of two great Italian poets: the nihilistic Leopardi and the tentatively mystical Montale. Gathering around those experiences multiple lore from music, philosophy and science, it becomes an extended meditation on mental suffering, glimpses of the ecstatic, and the double nature of our life, "skull / and beatific face," with "the immortal recombinants of fire and water."

Review Quotes

"It is impossible to leave Alan Williamson's Franciscan Notes without experiencing the inmost smile that is the response of the body and mind to intimate, authentic truth-telling. Each poem embodies processes of reckoning with the intricacies of mythmaking and unmasking in the 'lifework' of loving. Invoking the Franciscan spiritual practice of discernment through the 'trinity' of memory, intelligence, and love, Williamson unlocks in the reader expectations of sudden joy."

-- Kevin McIlvoy

"In Alan Williamson's Franciscan Notes, one senses at every turn a complex, shifting mind always at work on problems of mortality, family, the irretrievability of the past, and the fleeting nature of the present. The histories of literature, music, and art live in this book not as areas of academic study, but as humanizing forces, as clarifying lenses through which we can better understand the intersection of our own public and personal landscapes, our foibles, needs, and momentary brilliances. But this doesn't begin to touch on Williamson's ability to transform a kind of cultural erudition into work that is deeply moving on a personal level. This is marvelous collection by a poet whose work I have admired for years."

--Kevin Prufer