Sage & Disciple - by Samuel Green (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

50 years in the life of a poet who has deliberately lived a life outside the academy, writing poems that come from direct engagement with the natural world, a heritage of working class experience and connection, and a conviction that poetry can play a crucial role in our everyday life, both as readers and creators.

Samuel Green has spent a lifetime writing from the locus of place, grounded in his beloved Pacific Northwest. This gathering of poems from his prior collections lends testimony to that major preoccupation. Whether he is writing about interactions with the environment, with other people, with the often difficult fact vs. myth of family, with wartime service, with loss and grief, Green's work is always immediate and honest.

Review Quotes

"Reading Samuel Green's Sage & Disciple, I found myself swept up by two books at once. The first was the one I had expected--a superb new and selected volume that provided an overview of Green's lively career as a poet. Here was half a century of work, all of it worthy of attention. As I read on, however, I found another, even more compelling book. Green's poems gave me a startling sense of an actual life lived on its own terms. His poems have a tangible physicality, whether they are about work or travel or love. I was roused by Green's ability to transport me into the experience he describes--the taste, smell, and feel of real life. What more could I ask of a book of poems?"--Dana Gioia

"Samuel Green is a master calligrapher. He is also a masterful poet. The words he forms with his pen are as well-chosen and well-ordered and pleasing to the mind as is his script to the eye. From his first collection, Gillnets, to his magnificent, new and selected, Sage & Disciple, Green's poems are distinguished by an unblinking and precise physicality, whether it's the feel and click of an oar in its lock or the intricately detailed, field biologist's description of a street scene in Viet Nam, he writes the inward experience of a life made vivid by the clarity of his eye and his narrative voice."--Dan Gerber, author of The End of Michelangelo

"There's a whole world of work in these poems, then a whole world of silent, exact attentiveness, then another world again of the comradeship of death, memory, suffering and grief. What I admire most is the ways in which these worlds, like artfully carved rings of pearwood, slide in and around and above and through each other so that we live in all the worlds at once and at seeming random, all those worlds that are somehow, in some strange alchemy of breath, no more and no less than the ordinary world in which we say we live-- but more clearly seen."--Theo Dorgan, author of Once Was a Boy

"'Ground sense'--William Carlos Williams' term--undergirds these richly wrought, new and selected poems. Samuel Green's work in words is to reconnect himself and his readers to the natural order and the nature of being. He seems to keep one foot in the grave and one foot in the firmament."--Thomas Lynch, author of Bone Rosary (poems)

Praise for Samuel Green:

"Poets know (though critics often don't) that the words come to us unsought, initially. What we then do with them is a matter of craft and conscience. If they are in order, the combination of the three factors results in a work of integrity, according to Pound's definition, (graphically expressed in the Chinese ideogram): 'a man standing by his word.' Sam Green's work has that authenticity to a marked degree."--Denise Levertov

"Green's language, as clear and direct as any scientific discourse, is charged nevertheless with the intricate force of meaning and personality. These poems cherish us even while we are cherishing them."--Hayden Carruth

"Samuel Green's work is genius, subtle and yet obvious. His knowledge is singular and original . . . In the sought longing of his caught phrases, his work is his own, singly spoken; it will teach the reader who is engaged by its open report."--Marie Ponsot

"Poems plain yet also strange--distinct, penetrating, quietly radical. The one poem, "Stroke," itself will last centuries. This is a book of noh, which is to say, 'accomplishment.'"--Gary Snyder

About the Author

Samuel Green has lived off the grid for nearly forty years on an island off the Washington coast. With his wife, Sally, he is co-editor of the award-winning Brooding Heron Press. He has been a visiting professor at multiple colleges and universities, and was selected as the first Poet Laureate of Washington State. Other honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, an Artist Trust Fellowship in Literature, & a Washington State Book Award in Poetry. In 2018 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Seattle University. From 1966-1970, he was in the U.S. Coast Guard, with service in Vietnam.