Touching the Edge

     Innovative Beat poet Michael McClure has written a book of poems unlike any of his others. These dharma devotions are fruits of his Buddhist mediation practice. Like bold calligraphy moving vertically down a white scroll, they surprise the eye and mind, awakening us to a heightened sense of everyday things.     Beat poet McClure and Whalen, along with Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, caused a great seismic shift in literature with their fresh and liberated approaches to language and focus on the chimerical workings of the mind. Their meditative perspectives led not only to revolutionary poetry but to sustained and beautifully articulated Buddhist practices. In his new collection, McClure presents a series of dharma devotions — lithely observant and gently philosophical musings — that flow down the center of elongated pages like brooks, tree trunks, reeds, or the brush strokes of calligraphy. As the reader's eyes slide happily down these wavy word columns, joyful images of the natural world — hummingbirds and raccoons, honeysuckles and waterfalls, fog and stone — open like flowers in a the verdant field of McClure's sweetly bemused commentary on our wayward nature. Delicate as his poems are, they nevertheless pack a punch, powered by the tension of dualities and charged with agile leaps of thought. — Donna Seaman, Booklist, March 15, 1999