Description
- Kind: Chapbook
- Pages: 17
- Language: English
- ISBN: 1-933675-13-6
Praise
Bray’s work is like “a mixture of J.G. Ballard and Andrew Marvell” – Dana Gioia chairperson for the NEA.
“Edward Lear on acid”. – Chinese-American poet John Yau
“…original and complex”. – Poet James Dickey
Excerpt
I hear the wind whispering in the leaves, the
gurgling running water,
the bee among the flowers, the organ-bird
singing far, far away
in the shadows of the trees, the plaintive three-
syllable call
of an evening bird above the navel of the world,
above the earth,
the tides, the darkening tempest, the condor’s
flight over the summits
white with everlasting snow, that unimaginable
space east of the Andes.
Author
Paul Bray is the author of Ingens Sylva (Chroma Press, 1986) and of the massive, as yet unpublished Terrible Woods (which he has been writing since 1965). His novel Waldo and Mr. Death won the Wilton Moore Lockwood Prize for Most Distinguished Creative Writing at Bard College in 1975. His poems have appeared in Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics, The Bard Review, murmur, Bibliophilos, KE5TRA and elsewhere. The Magonia Trilogy is loosely based on his experiences in Maryland, New York City, Central America and Japan. Bray was a marginal presence on the New York art scene of the 70s and 80s, collaborating with visionary director Amos Poe (of Blank Generation fame) on Unmade Beds and with Tim Holmes in the rock group Brains in Heaven (in which he was the lyricist and lead vocal.) An inveterate nomad, Bray has lived all over the world, settling recently in northern New Mexico where he leads a Montaigne-like existence (detailed in his interminable blog) with his cats, his pug and his ethereally beautiful wife Satori Murata. He cites W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, William S. Burroughs and the blues as among his major influences.
Paul Bray, a long time resident of Santa Fe, passed away November 16, 2011.
