Description
The Headless Angel is a poetry collection divided into two sections, “The Truest Myth,” and “What the Soul Ate.” Bill Brown wrote these poems in his mid-sixties to explore aging, and surviving in this “often dark world” by paying attention to moments, solitude and the Creative Spirit of our natural world. Living in the Milky Way with over 300 billion stars, an un-understandable figure, is a true gift beyond our knowing. The poems are grouped seasonally, many are love poems to life, his wife, Suzanne, and the precious struggle to live each day at a time. Other poems reach back into his life’s journey with new visions. Come, take this journey with him.
Praise for The Headless Angel
Sometimes I feel there is nothing more holy than encountering a Bill Brown poem. For this poet, church is found “Sunday on the Ridge” with the metronome of a cat’s tail and the hymnal of tree leaves. Brown softly enters the lush pastoral landscapes of his past and present life, weaving personal slices of memory and myth with the vibrant theater of nature like “a crocus blossom in the snow” or “A sea of broom sage….” These incredible poems are replete with cats, trees, quiet mornings with coffee, squirrels on the roof, a letter to Neruda, the lover’s easy breath, and the wafting scent of fresh baked bread. Brown needles the solitude and ongoingness of creation with such deft mastery of language, prosody, and syntax. Each poem is a prayer, a whispered utterance of delight and glory, reaching in the dirt for the divine. This is a poet deeply connected to the earth—the forest loam—putting his ear to the sacred ground by translating the abstract feelings of loss and hope and grief and family. The older poet is still the young boy rubbing birch bark in the dark. The older poet is still my first mentor, the one who taught me the wonderment of words. This book is a testament to his incredible life and love for the “deepening with questions” and the “Heart in throat words” swirling all around and through the sanctuaries inside us. “How paying attention makes the world specific / and the names that name it”: this is ultimately what Bill Brown taught me and keeps teaching me through his voluminous work: precision and connection—the human tapestry weaving your life to mine, to the readers and back again. This book is a constant communion.
—Tiana Clark
In “What Light There Is,” Bill Brown writes: “…inside the heart’s / closet where there / are no empty hangers, / dreams bargain…” The poems in this collection are rich with such wisdom and beauty, each bargaining for a second, a third read, and more. Brown’s words resonate with what’s deepest in our hearts. If I’m ever sent to that desert island where we can take only a handful of books, The Headless Angel will have to be among them.
—Cathy Ann Kodra
[A] scent / …softens my old man’s shoulders …. Nature and memory fill Brown’s latest collection with joy and sorrow. The Headless Angel celebrates our interconnectedness with nature and how much we benefit creatively and spiritually by what she offers. Packed with wisdom and candor, these meditative poems explore the choices we make; like a child first learning the wonders of this world, we can choose / to argue with the world or to be / amazed at small hours. Brown’s anchor is family: that sacred place where shadows of secrets kept or stories told around the table continue to haunt our dreams. The ghosts of those closest to us crowd the garden where the headless angel keeps watch. Sensuous language revels in both light and darkness, knowing along with life, you / will lose the things you worship. In the current climate of clamor and distrust, the echo of Brown’s finely crafted words enrich our lives, enfold us with words of comfort. And we will return to them again and again.
—KB Ballentine
Whether the humor of “Traffic Salvation,” with its word play and on-spot descriptions of the modern world’s least-favorite pastime, or the prayers imbedded in “On a Cloudy August Day,” “Waiting, September Morning,” “Today’s News,” and many others, the poems in Bill Brown’s latest collection, The Headless Angel, are more than reward for a few hours spent in their company. The natural world of “crows jostling each other in flight,” “a white oak cathedral filled with starlings,” and “red maple buds whispering birth” blend with the joys of home—“a maple table patinaed with living,” “an antique bed bought at a roadside stand”—to create poems that place the reader in the immediacy of a well-considered and well-loved life.
—Connie Jordan Green
