The Blossoms Are Ghosts at the Wedding: Selected Poems & Essays - Softcover

Poetry. This is a book of poems and essays. The essays are the variously ripened fruit of the author's passion to scout the spooky verge between language and nature. The "imagination" precipitated between humanity and the world around us provides the means for our meanings. ("As a species we have lived in nature's necessary wisdom far longer than we have in the quicksilver machinations of our wit.") The essays glance off and into the weathered mutual "musings" of word and world and pry at the nut-smooth knot we daily mouth. The essays aim to finger more finely the threads of their stories. THE BLOSSOMS ARE GHOSTS AT THE WEDDING also hosts a band of "witness" poems and prose vignettes that want to sing between the live immensity of creation and the stubborn flicker of our awareness. "Essayist, poet, sculptor, and ecological & wild salmon visionary, Tom Jay is an eloquent spokesman for the riverine realm of the Pacific Northwest. These poems and essays shimmer with insight and hard-won wisdom. Like salmon at sea, Jay's subjects range widely. His essays move easily and surely among history and folklore, nature and community. They explore the hidden roots of language and commonplace mysteries of watersheds. And his words inevitably circle back home--to the heart of what it means to be human in a wondrous but threatened world"--Tim McNulty.

Tom Jay has worked as a salmon fisherman, a bronze foundry operator, and, for the last seven years, a sculptor. He lives with his wife Sara Mall, also a sculptor, on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State in a "funky" pole house they built in the seventies. A lot of what Tom says has to do with serving a place - the soul of a place, the ghosts of a place. He does this with his art, and he does it with efforts to restore the salmon run to the Chimacum Creek near where he lives.