Flowers & Sky by Aaron Shurin; Entre Rios Books, $12
In his latest book "Flowers & Sky," prolific local San Francisco poet Aaron Shurin has produced a slim yet potent volume of significant yet delicately rendered prose and poetry that fans should enjoy slowly to savor the meaning behind his words.
Included are two lectures Shurin gave in 2016, each establishing a "governing image" that channeled him "back into my own work in a kind of recursive voyage of discovery." Those separate images comprise the title of the book, flowers and sky. The first talk, delivered at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa as part of the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies, is a unique, shimmering "bouquet of text" ruminating on flowers, told through the lens of Oberon's floral soliloquy in "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
The piece blooms with picturesque imagery such as the vast fields of black-eyed Susans flowing across the Eastern fields of Shurin's summer camp when he was a boy, or lush forest walks with American poet Denise Levertov. He also writes about the first journal he ever crafted in 1968, which "bore witness to my awakening interest in poetry" and escorted him, like a silent partner, on excursions throughout Europe.
His floral appreciation continues in a segment about a house sublet in Marin County in 2003, where a "watering chore" in exchange for his stay wound up morphing into a "herculean effort of weeding, soaking, and mothering."
Shurin writes about when he lent his lyrical eye to Barron's Book Notes series on "Dream" and, through his sharpened eye, hoped to ease high school students into the tragicomedy dreamscapes of Shakespeare without any missteps or confusion. He knows the power of those verses: "They are my 'sweet musk roses,' and in their swoon my spell found its making."
The second lecture, delivered while participating on a panel called "What is poetics?" as part of the University of Washington/Bothell's Fall Convergence in Poetry, meditates on the reasons why, as pointed out by a curious reader, the word and imagery of the "sky" appear so often throughout Shurin's poetry. Another commentator notices his fixation with the words "mouth" and "lips." Shurin writes that particular focus is "a kind of gay marriage between homo-carnality and poetic sonority, avatars both of the oral."
His use of the notion of "sky" is prevalent throughout his work. Shurin explains why with grace and in the kind of eloquent language he is known for. He uses sky-bound images in a "dance for a friend, who wanted to mark his survival with HIV." He ends his lectures with six sky poems commemorating the vast, limitless airspace above us, whether it be "icy clear, cloudless" or "a mound of abalone dust."
Included with the book purchase is a digital audio download of the writer reading its longer essay and all of the new poems. Shurin is a skilled, dynamic orator, so this bonus material is not to be missed.