Abraxas

Sterling Warner’s Abraxasis a magical mystery world. The poems are snapshots of free spirits, a wide-ranging and vivid observation, appreciation, and exaltation. Music and philosophy weave through this wonderful book by a poet of singular vision and voice. These poems are “moon phases/tides & planet positions for farmers & lovers.” —Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate This book says “come stroll with me through manicured paths” of poetry where the lush names of things of the world—inner and outer in a mobius strip of self from a poet fully in the world—”whisper mellow notes like a shakuhachi” and fulfill William Carlos Williams’s promise of good poetry: “no thought but in things.” Portraits of imagery emerge with the clarity of one coming out of fog into focus. These are songs to home-life, love, sex, howls against injustice including against flora and fauna as well as against the Earth itself and to one’s body, hymns against the ever-growing dark of death: the last gate. These are poems varied in their voice but single in their vision, where a simple obstruction or opposition opens the “doors of perception” in a floodgate; and grief becomes—just that—in a full-dressed poem. As in “Prodigal Driftwood” it’s “a buoyant, endless odyssey” onwards; both mysteries and knowledge lay beyond each passage, those closures and openings that define and liberate us, the myth of self equal to the mythologies of the world. Here is The Muse as poem, an undefinable power and “God of all gods” held in the impossible balance of a single word: Abraxas. “Seductive. Disarming. Persuasive. Enchanting.” —Lorna Dee Cervantes, Poet In Abraxas, Sterling Warner’s poems range from baseball to Hildegard, from Yggdrasil to a contemporary Cressida, from tornadoes to jumping trains. Nothing escapes his poet’s eye. We glimpse children on the beach, war ships in their harbour, the daring Anne and the boldly individualistic Althea. He wryly observes youthful love and delights in recalling adolescent exploits, avocados jade beauty and childish dinner table mayhem. He brings the poet’s irony to mirror gazing, to change and loss and the diminished expectations that time brings. If you love that which is rich, diverse, sensual and knowledgeable—expressed in language that delights in lushness—you will find much to please in this eclectic collection. —Neil Creighton, Author of The Colquhoun Chronicles