Jay Ramsay Profile Jay Ramsay is the author, co-author/translator and editor of over 30 books of poetry and non-fiction, most recently Into the Further Reaches: an anthology of Contemporary British Poetry celebrating the spiritual journey (PSAvalon, 2007) Out of Time: Poems 1998-2008 (PSAvalon, 2008), Anamnesis: the remembering of soul (The Lotus Foundation, 2008), and The Poet in You (O Books, 2009) which publishes part of his Chrysalis poetry correspondence course for the first time.'Man with your wild wild Celtic heart And overflows with words and gifts of Self for all who come...' by Irina ( ... for Jay - extract) Awen title: Places of Truth - journeys into sacred wilderness News from Jay... at last my 'Chrysalis - the poet in you' correspondence course (running since 1990) has been published in paperback by John Hunt @ O Books. It is published as THE POET IN YOU, 154pp, p/b, £11.99 - generously endorsed by Ted Hughes, Kathleen Raine, Robert Bly, and Lindsay Clarke; and contains work by many contemporaries who are friends as well as colleagues. ISBN 978 184 694 0255 I'm really pleased with it and I hope it will encourage people to see poetry more creatively, also as a psychological and spiritual path. The book functions as a 9 month course with contextualized chapters, exercises, study poems, with reccomended and further reading; and people can work with me as a tutor through it. It is a carefully structured journey (you know my work !). I have seen wonderful results with it over nearly 20 years now. I hope very much you will order it for your bookshop or library as well, and reccomend it to any younger people you know who have a feeling for poetry. It is a genuinely popular and spiritual book for everyone, to inspire people to find that voice that is authentically (and individually) ours. If you'd like to get hold of it, please visit www.o-books.net or call the distributors - Orca in Poole, Dorset - direct on 01202-665432 email orders@orcabookservices.co.uk they are very efficient. If you want any leaflets about it to give friends, please email catherine.harris@o-books.net She can also supply review copies if you want to write about it. I believe it was the first correspondence course of its kind in the UK that deliberately combines poetry with personal development, and has been described as 'unique and inspiring' (Network Ireland) for this reason. This is my last new book for a while (!); following Anamnesis - the remembering of soul (www.lotusfoundation.org.uk), Out of Time - Selected Poems 1998-2008 (www.willparfitt.com), and Places of Truth - journeys into sacred wilderness (www.awenpublications.co.uk) Visit Jay Ramsay's website here IN THE ABER VALLEY for Eileen The first sight of the houses that are there and not there among the low stunted trees in spring leaf in the high wild bowl of this mountain valley in the sunlight, and behind the light. 'You can almost see them', you say, and you're right. Round stone walls, rough thatch, rising smoke skin-clad, bare-armed hunters, and the women folk as we hover in the future where they can't see us and we can't quite hear them either... and the two high waterfalls are as they were great white threads of lace drifting down in the same primordial silence. And I don't know if it was finding this gnarled distended fragile tree root the width of a piece of bark, forming a low triangular gate we crawled through and under the arms of a beech below with a stream flung out from a hollow that opened something, playing as we were; but when we got down to the river's edge where it crosses the onward path we both paused, entering that silence, and our own. A hawthorn sapling beside it, the water glittering smooth dry stones in a row for the crossing three short steps to the other side and suddenly you know as you stand there that nothing has ever happened all is always now, all One Day night and day, so then is now, here the light brightening on the side of your face where you lean against a boulder the warm wind breathing on your neck and we are in the summerland as it is in us. Stand in the river, then, astride the stones where time is standing still as its flow and cross to where the memory of the air still spells danger: changing, hardening grey the world that is always outside, waiting but melting here, as we may too free of the need to meet enemies, or make them and greet each other in the One Dream we¹ve all been dreaming: to live without fear entering into Creation, not as a frozen idyll, but living for the day, and at last, for each other for the love of the earth, where the land is summer. May 10-16th 2008 Stroud BY LOCH ARROW Reed beds in the misty morning water, islanded trees still in their full-leaved silhouette and something in us that knows this silence that is only made of natural sound... birds flying from the lane, cows at the grass, something in us knows wherever we are in the hushing that comes over us that is the mist and brightness in our eyes, now the wind breathes in the trees, the light is rising, and the curlew calling below is not a mobile phone; something in us knows, created as we are, that only finds peace when it returns to the same substance in our eyes and ears, that is nameless, numinous, and eternally precise as the flight of an arrow to its seeing mark ‹ awake, alive: and in our heart of hearts. Jay Ramsay 15.7.03 |